Difficulties in Determining Age.

Many and widely different guesses have been hazarded respecting the age of these remains, but a moment's reflection will show how impossible it is to get any certain data upon Which to proceed. Some of the caves have been used as burying places, and holes may have been dug to receive the bones. In others the bones may have sunk into soft mud, or been disturbed by water. In order to determine, even approximately, the time occupied in the formation of a particular deposit, we must assume that the same causes now in operation have always been operating. But this, we know, is most improbable. In no country more than New Zealand are there better proofs of the unreliability of conclusions drawn from such premises. Being in transition from a state of nature to a state of cultivation, the country is a favourable one for observation—the changes are rapid and well marked. Consider for example, the gravel deposits of the Wairarapa plain and Hutt valley. There, broad rivers, carrying down enormous quantities of stones and gravel, have shifted their beds frequently within a very few years. A farmer has looked out of his window in the morning after a heavy flood and beheld to his dismay that where his cattle were depastured the day before a river was flowing, while his neighbour discovered, with equal astonishment, nothing but a broad stony track where he had long been wont to fish. Art is now doing what nature might ultimately have accomplished, by strengthening with protective works the points where these rivers are liable to break away. The destruction of the heavy forest on the surrounding hills will diminish the volume of water. And we may easily picture a learned savant of Masterton city, two centuries hence—finding these deep and widely-spread gravel deposits miles away from a little brook flowing through smiling fields in its well-formed bed—propounding learned theories about the causes of the boulder formation upon the Wairarapa plains, and proving by abstruse calculations that the Maori bones discovered in the lower gravels date back at the very least to the glacial period.

In other parts of New Zealand, rivers that were navigable have completely silted up in the course of a few years. At the entrance to the Waimea river (near Nelson) the depth of water has been decreased within ten years, by deposits of mud, from 14 feet to 5 feet. The Government are at this moment erecting a retaining wall at Collingwood with a view of restoring the Aore River to its proper channel. The denudation of the forest-clad hills has materially affected the volume and the rapidity of our rivers, and page 13 the amount of debris brought down. In our harbours similar phenomena are everywhere observable. Banks of sand forming at one point have given a new direction to tidal currents, producing extensive and rapid alterations. Landslips have prepared new stumbling-blocks for unborn Lyells and Darwins. At Taupo, within the last twenty years, the chief Te Heuheu and his entire settlement were engulphed by an enormous landslip. We can well imagine that some enterprising settler a century hence, sinking a well on the spot, may cast out the buried warror's skull from the bottom of his shaft, and another Whitney arising shall prove conclusively to his own satisfaction that instead of coming here about the 14th century, as declared in their traditions and genealogies, the Maoris have occupied these islands at least five thousand years. Disturbances like these, climatic changes, and a multitude of other forces have been at work with tenfold greater power in Europe than in New Zealand, even within the historical period, and they constitute an ever-varying quantity which it is utterly impossible to compute.

When it is said that human remains have been found intermingled with those of the last representatives of the mammoth and other extinct mammalian monsters, the mind is carried back to some very remote period. But the deposits in which these remains are found prove that the animals survived till a comparatively recent time, and man unquestionably assisted in their final extermination. One contemporary of the mammoth—our friend the moa—has not long disappeared from the earth, and some people are sanguine enough to believe that the mountain fastnesses of Otago will yet yield us a living bird to keep company with the three surviving specimens of his old companion the giant notornis, the last of which was killed near Lake Te Anau, Otago, three years ago. The causes that produce the extinction of certain species are still a matter of the vaguest speculation; Cuvier attributed the sudden disappearance of extensive forms of life—and no doubt rightly—to violent changes in the condition of the earth. We know that certain races of men are rapidly disappearing. The whole of the ancient inhabitants of Polynesia, including the Maoris, are dying out with extraordinary rapidity. "The black man always gives way before the white man," is a commonly offered but exceedingly indefinite explanation of the phenomenon. And the answer fails to meet the case, because, as Mr A. R. Wallace proved by the rapid decrease of the Dyaks—and the same facts have been observed in many parts of Polynesia—once densely populated places, where white men have never intruded, give the same evidence of decay that we see in the rest of the Polynesian people. Nor in New Zealand does the presence of the white man account for that extraordinary sterility which is one of the most striking causes of Maori depopulation. Mr. Fenton, Chief Judge of the Native Lands page 14 Court in statistics relating to certain Waikato tribes, shewed that there were 650 deaths to 320 births; while out of 433 marriages, 154 had been without issue; and 68 were without children through death, leaving only 221 with living issue. A mulititude of phenomena lead to the inference that races, like individuals, reach a stage in their history when they become incapable of reproduction and then they decrease and finally disappear by a process of natural decay. A very valuable paper on this subject by A. K. Newman, M.B., M.R.C.P., is published in the "Transactions of the New Zealand Institute" for 1881.

Besides the depth of alluvial deposits, other tests have been applied to determine man's antiquity. Agassiz found a human bone in the coral beds of Florida, which he believed must from its position have been lying there ten thousand years. But here again the same difficulty confronts us. Can we be sure that the formation of the coral has gone on with unvarying regularity for 10,000 years. The balance of probabilities turns the other way. All that can be affirmed on this question of antiquity, as Professor Dawkins justly observes, is this—that recent discoveries appear to favour the belief in a higher antiquity for man than was at first supposed.^*