Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 14, 1903.djvu/266

240 divergences of language and physique. But I submit that the evidence here produced renders it quite reasonable to point to the scrolls and gaping mouths on Peruvian pottery (see Fig. 25) as originating in the old-world myth on which so much has been said. I do not attempt to follow the wanderings of Malay rovers, but merely call attention to the fact that they can be traced to South America and to Easter Island, both at a greater distance from home than is New Zealand, where I venture to submit the Gorgon Myth was carried and still survives.

Mr. Edge Partington says: "In sending me a photograph of a very ancient slab from a Pataka or storeohuse, in the

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Auckland Museum, Mr. J. Martin suggests that this particular way of depicting the Manaia is the genesis of the Maori scroll." Of this slab I give a representation (Fig. 26) from Plate E, and in asking close examination of it, again quote Dr. Haddon (op. cit.), "but the manaias which he figures appear to me as if they might very well be degraded and conventionalised representations of birds." To me, they appear representations of the whole story of which the mosaics in the Museum at Naples (Figs. 23 and 24) are but another version told in a more literal fashion. On this Maori carving the subject is twice repeated. We have the somewhat "degraded" human figure of the Medusa, split