country and Hawaiki (probably Tahiti or Rarotonga). An account of several of these expeditions is given by Mr. Elsdon Best in the “Transactions of the New Zealand Institute” (vol. xxxvii, art. ii), but I believe there is no tradition extant as to how the first navigators managed to find their way here, and so were able to give the course to those who followed. It is related that Ui-te-rangiora, who lived in Fiji about A.D. 650, after making many voyages of discovery and founding colonies in different parts of the Pacific, found his way to the Southern Ocean; and that another celebrated navigator, desiring to behold the wonderful things described by his predecessor, actually penetrated to the frozen seas of the Antarctic—“a foggy, misty, and dark place, not seen by the sun” (“Hawaiki,” pp. 128, 129). But beyond the Island of Rapa, or Opara, in 28° S., about eleven hundred miles south-east of Rarotonga, at one time thickly inhabited by Polynesians, there is, I believe, no mention of any land seen on these voyages. In any case it is quite clear that New Zealand was not visited, or the fact would surely have been mentioned in the circumstantial accounts that have been preserved. We are therefore left to speculate as to how the original discovery of these islands was made. It may, of course, have been that a party were driven out of their course by wind and weather, and arrived here simply as castaways; but it is far more likely that they had something to go upon in fixing their objective. As already stated, there is, I believe, no tradition that will throw any light on the subject. If a Maori of the present day is asked how the first immigrants found their way to the country, he will either answer that he does not know or that he has never heard, or else he relegates the whole matter to the domain of the supernatural. It was perhaps a taniwha that showed them the course—a fabulous monster often credited with more than human powers and intelligence; or it might have been one of their atuas or ancestral deities, who, under the form of a shark, a cormorant, or even of a blow-fly, either swam or flew ahead of the canoe, and so led the navigators to their destination. A theory advanced by the Rev. Wiki te Paa, of Northern Wairoa, inclines one to believe that a core of truth may be contained in this strange myth. It was the annual migration of the kuaka, or godwit (Limosa novæ-zealandiæ), Mr. Te Paa thinks, that led the Hawaikians to believe that lands existed in the direction of New Zealand, and furnished them with a guide on their voyage; and an examination of the life-history of that wonderful little bird at least gives an air of probability to the idea.