The name “Maori” is said to mean “native,” but the boast on the part of the Maori race contained in the title “Natives of the Soil” is one which conflicts with their traditions. These make them out to be mere interlopers--Tahitians, they themselves say--who, within historic ages, sailed down island by island in their war canoes, massacring the inhabitants, and, finally landing in New Zealand, found a numerous horde of blacks of the Australian race living in the forests of the South Island. Favored by a year of exceptional drought, they set fire to the woods, and burnt to the last man, or drove into the sea the aboriginal possessors of the soil. Some ethnologists believe that this account is in the main correct, but hold that the Maori race is Malay, and not originally Tahitian: others have tried to show that the conflict between blacks and browns was not confined to these two islands, but raged throughout the whole of Polynesia; and that it was terminated in New Zealand itself, not by the destruction of the blacks, but by the amalgamation of the opposing races. The legends allege war as the cause for the flight to New Zealand. The accounts of some of the migrations are circumstantial in the extreme, and describe the first planting of the yams, the astonishment of the people at the new flowers and trees of the islands, and many such details of the landing. The names of the chiefs and of the canoes are given in a sort of “catalogue of ships,” and the wars of the settlers are narrated at length, with the heroic exaggeration common to the legends of all lands. The canoe fleet reached New Zealand in the fifteenth century it is believed, and the people landed chanting a chorus-speech, which is still preserved: “We come at last to this fair land--a resting-place; Spirit of the Earth, to thee, we, coming from afar, present our hearts for food.” That the Maories are Polynesians there can be no doubt: a bird with them is “manu,” a fish “ika” (the Greek ἱχθυς, become with the digamma “piscis” and “poisson;” and connected with “fisch,” and “fish”), as they are throughout the Malayan archipelago and Polynesian isles; the Maori “atua,” a god, is the “hotua” of the Friendly Islanders; the “wahrés,” or native huts, are identical in all the islands; the names of the chief deities are the same throughout Polynesia, and the practice of tattooing, the custom of carving grotesque squatting figures on tombs, canoes, and “pahs,” and that of tabooing things, places, times, and persons, prevail from Hawaii to Stewart‘s Land, though not everywhere so strictly read as in the Tonga Isles, where the very ducks are muzzled to keep them from disturbing by their quacking the sacred stillness of “tapú time.”