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Preface.

Last year I was invited by the New Zealand Art Students' Association, a Society then about to be established for the study of Art and Nature as developed and displayed in Maori-land, to deliver an inaugural address. In complying with this request, it seemed to me that it would be beneficial to direct the thoughts of my audience to the history of the people whose art and country were to be the peculiar object of study of the new association, rather than to confine myself to the elaboration of generalities, as is the usual style of such addresses. I therefore prepared a lecture, purporting to be suggestions for a history of the origin and migrations of the Maori people.

Being requested by many friends—whether judicious or injudicious I shall learn from the fate of this little book—to print it with the necessary amplifications, I complied with the request, and the result is the appearance of the following pages.

Mr. I. D'Israeli, the father of the late Earl of Beaconsfield, says, in his "Curiosities of Literature," that a good preface is as essential to put the reader into good humour, as a good prologue is to a play, or a fine symphony is to an opera, containing something analogous to the work itself, so that we may feel its want as a desire not elsewhere to be satisfied. The Italians, he says, call the preface La salsa del libro, the sauce of the book, and if well-seasoned it creates an appetite in the reader to devour the book itself. The preface of a book appears to be, then, of the nature of a dangerous snare; if well written, it will excite an appetite which may not be gratified, and if ill composed, may disgust the reader and prevent him from trying the repast which is provided.

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To avoid the dilemma is easy by writing no preface at all. I am the more encouraged to this abstention by another remark of the same writer: "I have observed that ordinary readers skip over these little elaborate compositions. The ladies consider them as so many pages lost, which might be better employed in the addition of a picturesque scene, or a tender letter."

I am bound, however, to state that nearly all the facts and information in the annexed tractate are drawn from the writings of others. My own particular task has been that of collation, comparing evidences, drawing inferences, and founding a theory. Mr. Fornander, the learned judge of a district in the Hawaian Islands, stands foremost in the ranks of my authorities; and though I cannot agree with him in assigning an Aryan origin to, or any considerable Hindu-European consanguinity in the Polynesian race, and cannot concur in his theory of an Indian route of the people into the islands of the Indian Archipelago, yet I feel that it is very probable that if his book had not been written my lectures would not have been delivered.

I need not speak of the learned scholars of Europe whose works I have used. The mention of their great names is no more necessary than it is to refer to Sir Isaac Newton when treating of the law of gravitation.