INTRODUCTION.

The New Zealander shall speak for himself. Unacquainted with letters, and living in the Stone Age of the world, he shall relate the history of a people isolated for ages from the civilized nations of the world, and shall tell how his race for ages lived, loved, worshipped, worked, and warred.

His traditions, preserved with the most austere religious care, and rehearsed from age to age in the presence of the most select circles of youths by high priests of most ascetic life, who had received their knowledge from the gods, have preserved for him a history reliable as the histories of tribes sharpened by continual contact, and ripened by emulation in the art of literature.

His atuas divinities—

Tu, god of war;
Ta-whiri-ma-tea, god of the sky;
Rongo, god of the kumara sweet potato;
Tanga-roa, god of the sea;
Hau-mia, god of the fern-root—

had each his course of priests, through whom he communicated with the people in benevolence and love, or in dreadful majesty, and by whom only he was invoked, in solemn and awe-inspiring ceremonies—commanded the reverence of all classes of the people in every action of their lives.

No undertaking of any kind was commenced without propitiating and invoking the aid of the particular divinity within whose province it lay. Thus the services of the priests were in continual