look forward with a fatal resignation to the destiny of the final extinction of their race. They themselves say, ‘As clover killed the fern, and the European dog the Maori dog, as the Maori rat was destroyed by the pakeha rat, so our people also will be gradually supplanted and exterminated by the Europeans'.“ From Featherston in 1856 to Walsh in 1907 is half a century. The cumulative experience and study of half a century led the writers quoted above to see the Maori race facing nothing but rapid extinction. In view of the fact that these writers gathered the procurable data of their day and subjected them to careful analysis, their conclusions must be treated with respect. The Maori race should show more active signs of becoming extinct; yet in spite of the hopeless outlook expressed to von Hochstetter by the victims of the Taranaki War, the present generation refuses to comply with the picturesque but illogical simile of following the way of the vanished Maori rat and the extinct Maori dog. They do not appear to belong to the same class of mammal. The native fern does not seem to be tamely giving way to the European clover. In this respect the Maori has more in common with the flora than with the fauna. The quick and easy death prescribed by Dr. Newman has not been availed of as he led us to expect. Sir Walter Bullet's twenty-five years grace expired in 1909. The race that Archdeacon Walsh said was already potentially dead in 1907 should be literally so in 1922. Of the five papers quoted above, four have been published in the Transactions of this Institute, whilst the fifth was read before the Wellington Philosophical Society, Since the last address was delivered fifteen years have elapsed. It is therefore fitting that the present condition of the Maori race should be reviewed, to see how far the sad prognosis of the past has been borne out by the facts of the present. Population. Cook estimated the Maori population as 100,000. As pointed out by various writers, this estimate could have been only a very rough guess, formed from the coastal tribes that he saw. The west coast of the North Island he never explored. Northern Taranaki, from the evidence afforded by the denseness of the terraced bills, must have supported a very large population. Whakatane, the Waimana Valley, and the Tanranga district show innumerable signs of close occupation. In the Oruru Valley, in the north, the forts were so close together that they were termed Oruru pa karangatahi (Oruru with the forts aroused by one call). Consider the huge garrisons that must have been required to man the crater-forts near Pakaraka and Ohaeawai, in the Bay of Islands, and the many terraces extending over acres of ground in the Tamaki forts, on Mount Eden, and One Tree Hill. If the present Maori population of Orakei and the villages about Onehunga and Mangere were gathered to man the reconstructed parapets of Maunga-kiekie, how many terraces would they occupy? And yet there were other forts in this same district occupied at the same time. Furthermore, the population was not confined to the coast-line and its immediate vicinity. Occupation depended on food-supplies, and, incidentally, of course, on the ability to hold the territory producing them. The larger rivers and inland lakes produced fish in abundance in their due seasons. This supply was not confined to eels, but smaller fish, not considered by Europeans, made up for their lack of size by their quantity.