MR. GILBERT ARCHEY’S LECTURE

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 136, 30 August 1927, Page 4

MR. GILBERT ARCHEY’S LECTURE

J_JUMANS are sometimes apt to forget that they have been | endowed with muscles to wag a tail. Yet there is no tail to wag! Man’s relation to the anthropoid apes was traversed by Mr. Gilbert Archey, curator of the Auckland Museum, in a lecture which he delivered last night before the Anthropology and Maori Race Section of the institute. Both the chairman, Mr. W. Page Rowe, and. the lecturer cordially welcomed several members of the Aka-

rana Maori Association. “ These Maoris have given practical proof of their desire to study Maori ethnology,” said Mr. Archey, who related how the association had approached the museum council for a conference to discuss a basis of co-opera-tion.

“MISSING LINKS” The study of the form and structure of certain of the so-called “missing links,” said Mr. Archey, when dealing with the subject matter of anthropology. had resulted in highly-import-ant discoveries. First there was the Java skull. This man undoubtedly was a species of the ape. Later, in Germany, the Heidelberg jaw, heavy and massive, with humanlike teeth, was discovered. The Piltdown man, found in Sussex, was more advanced than the Java man. Other discoveries in France and Germany showed traces of a short stoclcily-built man, with low skull and overhanging brows. There had also been a remarkable race in the South of France of tall up-standing men, distinctly human, with capacious brain-space. Then came the neothilic, bronze and iron age races. STUDY THE MAORI! “What are we trying to find out regarding the Maori race?” asked Mr. Archey, who added that, provisionally, the Maoris -were said to be predominantly Caucasian. But in their journeyings to the Pacific they had come in slight contact with the other two great divisions of mankind —the Mongol and the Negroid. “We should study the Maori, his science, his morals, and his religion, his poetry, his song, his institutions, and his chivalry! We must study all these to discover i what we can use to our own betterment, and so that we may live happily and prosperously together in this country.” The importance of museums in this connection, emphasised Mr. Archey, could not be over-estimated. “The museum is not ‘to have and to hold,’ ” he said, “but to study what we have!”