A chief’s head is so exceedingly sacred that, if he should touch it with his own fingers, he may not touch anything else without having applied the hand to his nostrils and smelt it so as to restore to the head the virtue which was taken out of it by the touch. The hair of a chief is necessarily sacred, as growing upon his head. When it is cut, the operation is generally confided to one of his wives, who receives every particle of the cut hair in a cloth, and buries it in the ground. In consequence of touching the chief’s head, she becomes tapu for a week, during which time her hands are so sacred that she is not allowed to use them. Above all things, she may not feed herself, because she would then be obliged to pollute her hands by touching food, and such a deed would be equivalent to putting food on the chief’s head--a crime of such enormity that the mind of a Maori could scarcely comprehend its possibility. When engaged in his explorations in New Zealand, and employed in sketching every object of interest which came in his way, Mr. Angas found this notion about the chief’s head to be a very troublesome one. He was not allowed to portray anything connected with food with the same pencil with which he sketched the head of a chief, and to put a drawing of a potato, a dish for food, or any such object, into the same portfolio which contained the portrait of a chief, was thought to be a most fearful sacrilege. The artist had a narrow escape of losing the whole of his sketches, which a chief named Ko Tarui wanted to burn, as mixing sacred with profane things. They were only rescued by the intervention of Te Heu-heu, a superstitious old savage, but capable of seeing that the white man had meant no harm. Warned by this escape, Mr. Angas always made his drawings of tapu objects by stealth, and often had very great difficulty in eluding the suspicious natives. Even the carved image of a chief’s head is considered as sacred as the object which it represents. Dr. Dieffenbach relates a curious instance of this superstition. “In one of the houses of Te Puai, the head chief of all the Waikato, I saw a bust, made by himself, with all the serpentine lines of the moko, or tattooing. I asked him to give it to me, but it was only after much pressing that he parted with it. I had to go to his house to fetch it myself, as none of his tribe could legally touch it, and he licked it all over before he gave it to me; whether to take the tapu off, or whether to make it more strictly sacred, I do not know. He particularly engaged me not to put it into the provision bag, nor to let it see the natives at Rotu-nua, whither I was going, or he would certainly die in consequence. “Payment for the bust he would not take; but he had no objection to my making him a present of my own free will: which I accordingly did, presenting him and his wife with a shirt each.”