principal migration took place about five hundred years ago.  It seems likely enough, however, that previous immigrants had gone before them.  One remnant of these, the now almost extinct Moriori, colonised the Chatham Islands, whither they were not followed by the conquering Maori until the present century.  The two most famous of the great double canoes of the Maori settlers were the Arawa (shark), and the Tainui (flood-tide).  On board thereof, with the men, women, and children, were brought dogs, rats, the gourd and taro root, and the invaluable kumara or sweet potato.  The karaka tree, whose glossy, almost oily-looking leaves were in after days to be seen in every village, was another importation.  With these tradition ranks the green parakeet and blue pukeko or swamp-hen, two birds whose rich plumage has indeed something in it of tropical gaudiness, at any rate in contrast with the sober hues of most New Zealand feathers.  The Tainui canoe was said to have found its last resting-place near the mouth of the Mokau river.  A stone still lies there which is treasured by the natives as the ancient anchor of their sacred craft.  Some years ago, when a European carried this off, they brought an action against him and obtained an order of the Court compelling him to restore it.  Not far away stands a grove of trees alleged to have sprung from the Tainui’s skids.  Certainly Sir James Hector, the first scientific authority in the Colony, finding that these trees grow spontaneously nowhere else in New Zealand, named them Pomaderris Tainui.  But though, for once, at any rate, science was not indisposed to smile on tradition and Maori faith triumphed, and the unbeliever was for a while confounded, it unhappily seems now quite certain that the congener of Pomaderris Tainui is found only in Australia, one of the few lands nigh the Pacific which cannot have been Hawaiki.

It will be safe to say that the Maori colonists landed at different points and at widely different dates, and that later immigrants sometimes drove earlier comers inland or southward.  More often, probably, each small band sought out an empty territory for itself.  On this tribes and sub-tribes grew up, dwelling apart from each other.  Each district became the land of a clan, to be held by tomahawk and spear.  Not even temporary defeat and slavery deprived a tribe of its land:  nothing did that but permanent expulsion followed by actual seizure and occupation by the conquerors.  Failing this, the right of the beaten side lived on, and could be reasserted after years of exile.  The land was not the property of the arikis or chiefs, or even of the rangatiras or gentry.  Every free man, woman and child in each clan had a vested interest therein which was acknowledged and respected.  The common folk were not supposed to have immortal souls.  That was the distinction of the well born.  But they had a right to their undivided share of the soil.  Even when a woman