Page:Journal of American Folklore vol. 12.djvu/591

 Laieikawai. 243

published a book, 1 in which he traces many analogies between the rites, superstitions, and habits of thought of the Maori, compared with the Greeks and other ancient nations. Viewed in this aspect, the old legendary tales and poems of the Hawaiians have consider- able interest. I cannot doubt but that they bring down to us much derived from a very remote antiquity. It is also to be remem- bered that before the introduction of writing, the brains of living men were the only records that nations had. There were deposited the genealogies of the chiefs, there alone were to be found the chron- icles of their wars, the boundaries of their possessions, and every- thing which it was desirable to secure from oblivion. A diligently cultivated and retentive memory, therefore, gave a man position and abundance ; the memory was diligently cultivated, and became capable of performing feats which to us who lean on writing and books seem very surprising. Maui, one of the Hawaiian islands, is about seventy miles long, and from thirty to forty wide, with some deep indentations proportionally extending its seaboard. At the beginning of this century, the whole coast, and much of the interior, was cultivated and inhabited. Then tracts were divided into lands of one hundred or several hundred acres. I have known a man who could begin at any part of the island, and go round the whole of it, naming each possession in its order, and giving its boundaries. We must not, therefore, wonder at the accurate knowledge of the geo- graphy of Greece which Homer displays in his catalogue of the ships and leaders. That strength of memory was rather an attribute of his age than a merit peculiar to himself. It is more than probable that many of his contemporaries could have performed the same feat.

Furthermore, we find that when the imagination has once shaped a picture in which men delight, that picture is subsequently taken as the model from which after ages copy. Virgil is not Homer, very far was he in time, farther if possible in position, in the habitual feel- ings and actions of the men among whom he lived. But Virgil is so full of Homeric ideas, that had the Greek poem perished we should yet have been able to have conceived from the yEneid how men con- ducted themselves in what are termed the heroic ages of Greece. Nay, such has been the mastery of the Homeric lay over the minds of men, that its form, which we term epic, and the train of ideas running through it, has been taken almost to the present day as the model for every lengthened poem. Even in Milton's " Paradise Lost" the Christian God figures as a sort of Agamemnon, great in bis might, and the prince of Hell is an Achilles unconquerable in his pride.

1 The Polynesian Mythology of Sir George Grey was published in 1855. The manner of reference would lead to the opinion that the lecture of Dr. Rae could not have been delivered very much later.

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