[Fig. 4.  An Australian Stele:  283.jpg]

We have engraved one solitary Australian attempt at drawing curved lines.  The New Zealanders, a race far more highly endowed, and, when Europeans arrived amongst them, already far more civilised than the Australians, had, like the Australians, no metal implements.  But their stone weapons were harder and keener, and with these they engraved the various spirals and coils on hard wood, of which we give examples here.  It is sometimes said that New Zealand culture and art have filtered from some Asiatic source, and that in the coils and spirals designed, as in our engravings, on the face of the Maori chief, or on his wooden furniture, there may be found debased Asiatic influences. {286} This is one of the questions which we can hardly deal with here.  Perhaps its solution requires more of knowledge, anthropological and linguistic, than is at present within the reach of any student.  Assuredly the races of the earth have wandered far, and have been wonderfully intermixed, and have left the traces of their passage here and there on sculptured stones, and in the keeping of the ghosts that haunt ancient grave-steads.  But when two pieces of artistic work, one civilised, one savage, resemble each other, it is always dangerous to suppose that the resemblance bears witness to relationship or contact between the races, or to influences imported by one from the other.  New Zealand work may be Asiatic in origin, and debased by the effect of centuries of lower civilisation and ruder implements.  Or Asiatic ornament may be a form of art improved out of ruder forms, like those to which the New Zealanders have already attained.  One is sometimes almost tempted to regard the favourite Maori spiral as an imitation of the form, not unlike that of a bishop’s crozier at the top, taken by the great native ferns.  Examples of resemblance, to be accounted for by the development of a crude early idea, may be traced most easily in the early pottery of Greece.  No one says that the Greeks borrowed from the civilised people of America.  Only a few enthusiasts say that the civilised peoples of America, especially the Peruvians, are Aryan by race.  Yet the remains of Peruvian palaces are often by no means dissimilar in style from the ‘Pelasgic’ and ‘Cyclopean’ buildings of gigantic stones which remain on such ancient Hellenic sites as Argos and Mycenae.  The probability is that men living in similar social conditions, and using similar implements, have unconsciously and unintentionally arrived at like results.

[Fig 5. a, A Maori Design; b, Tattoo on a Maori’s face:  285.jpg]