Reviews. 5 2 1
"Transactions" in which they are told, the tales about him by the islanders scattered over thousands of miles from New Zealand to Hawaii. The general reader may learn here from a series of agreeable narrations how Maui cheated his brethren, lifted the sky, obtained fire for mankind, fished up islands, snared the sun with the ropes still seen as long straight beams amongst the clouds of morning and afternoon, and was finally slain, in the quest for immortal life, by the death goddess, wakened by the inopportune laughter of the water wagtail.
The group of tales about Hina, — the Woman in the Moon of Polynesia and the mother (or grandmother) of Maui, — has also attractions peculiar to itself, and the photographic illustrations of places mentioned in the Hawaiian versions of the lives of Hina and Maui are pleasing.
But unfortunately the collection is by way of republication of popular magazine articles, and is, in most cases, without definite references to authorities. This is more the pity as some of the sources, — such as Queen Liliuokalani's translations, and a Hawaiian annual (pp. 119-27) giving the forms localised in the island of Oahu, — are not readily accessible. If the reader is acquainted with the literature on the subject, casual references to Gill, Fornander, Ellis, Turner, White, and Sir George Grey, (who is misnamed Gray in the index and in several places in the text,) will tell him sometimes, but by no means always, the volume, though never the pages, to be consulted for exact accounts. Instead of serving in this way as a mere reminder of material to be sought elsewhere, the present book might have been made a much more useful one by the addition of full references, or at least of" a bibliography as complete as possible, and of a good index. The present index is unusually bad and incomplete.
K. R. Wright.
