Maori-Polynesian Research.

The interests that are usually styled hobbies often become the things by which a man is chiefly remembered. It was so with Edward Tregear. Apart from his professional and official work, he found time for a vast amount of research. His special enthusiasm was the study of Maori-Polynesian subjects, and in particular language, the dialects of the Pacific. He loved, too, the bush and all its life; he knew New Zealand in the wild unspoiled state, and he delighted to speak and write of it. His early-days' close contact with the Maori gave him a knowledge of the life and customs and the special culture of the native race, and he began then a study of the language which he continued to the end of his days. His poetic mind appreciated the songs and chants and oratory of the Maori, and the endless store of legendry and tradition. He saw the people in war and in peace, and when opportunities came for confidential talk in camp and kainga he strove to penetrate the secrets of the Maori soul. He gathered much data, which he published in his later days in a book on “The Maori Race.” But he did not long confine his studies to the New Zealand Maori alone. From these islands his range of enquiry passed on to the tropic north, to embrace the whole of the Pacific groups which are included in the term Polynesia, and on again to the lands of Indonesia, tracing back to remote origins the words of the Maori, and linking up in philology the New Zealander, the natives of Tahiti, and the Tuamotus, and Rarotonga and other South Sea isles and groups with the Malay tribes, and further on carrying the connection to the plains of India. The fruit of his long and enormous labours in the study of words was that great work the “Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary.”

This is without exception the most notable contribution yet made to our knowledge of the Maori tongue and its allied languages or dialects of the Pacific Islands. It represents many years of enquiry, an immense amount of correspondence and delving into vocabularies of peoples from the Eastern Pacific to the Malays and the shores of Asia. Its special value to a student of Maori lies in the comparative lists which follow the New Zealand word; the Polynesian and other equivalents are given after each word, and its meaning. In this way we are shown at a glance the exact relation between our Maori words and the South Sea tongues, and the ancient meanings of words whose significance has somewhat changed, and of many South Sea words now obsolete here. Archaic expressions in Maori poetry and sacred ritual are sometimes page 19

The late Mr. S. Percy Smith (Surveyor-General) co-worker with Mr. Edward Tregear in Maori-Polynesian research.

explained by a reference to the dictionary; it is appreciated by those of us who now and again engage in the translation of Maori lore. Perhaps it is only a few who can fully appreciate the magnitude of Tregear's labour and achievement in this work. But even a brief study of the book will impress the reader with some sense of the toil, the industry, the skill which went to its making.

Besides the “Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary” a number of smaller dictionaries and vocabularies engaged Tregear's patient brain. The publication of these, which included a dictionary of the Mangareva Islands (the Gambier group) in the Eastern Pacific, crowned the efforts displayed in the Comparative Dictionary and attracted a great deal of attention from philogists all over the world. The French Government took official cognisance of the great amount of work devoted to the dialects of the Pacific Islands under the control of France, and he received the high honour of Officer of the Academie Francaise.

Another work was a compilation of Maori-Polynesian folk-stories under the title of “Fairy Tales of New Zealand and the South Seas.” Another, and one which attracted a good deal of criticism, was “The Aryan Maori.” This book was raked fore and aft by one or two erudite New Zealand critics, who disagreed with Tregear's enthusiastic linking-up of the Maori with the peoples of India, offshoots of the Ayran race, and questioned his linguistic derivations and comparisons. Nevertheless, Tregear's theories were in the main soundly based. There were some also who questioned certain matters in the Comparative Dictionary. But that work remains unequalled. He put his life and soul into it, and it is by it that the value of his services to Polynesian research will chiefly be estimated.

Tregear's reputation as an ethnologist and philologist was worldwide. He became a member of several great learned associations—the Anthropological Society, the Historical Society, the French Society for the Study of Polynesian Lore, the Polynesian Society of Hawaii, the Royal Society of Italy, and he was also for many years a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. The Imperial Institute, too, elected him to membership. The names of these bodies sufficiently indicate the wide range of our busy New Zealander's interests and activities.