Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/649

Rh colleges, the elder as legislators and bishops; there may be land works and water mills, printing presses and newspapers; they may even increase in numbers. When it passes, they sink into parasites. Like other parasites, they lose their original characteristics. The Talleyrands and Metternichs whom Bishop Hadfield was acquainted with in New Zealand, and the chiefs whom Maning found as great in their own world as Pompeius and Cæsar in theirs, have disappeared like those ancient worthies. The Maori can no longer wield the merè nor the Australian the boomerang.

III. The destructive effect of the parasite on its host has its parallel in the reaction on the individuals of higher races who come in contact with the indigenes. The residence of some of these precedes systematic colonization. Of one hundred and fifty pakehas scattered over the North Island of New Zealand before it was annexed—runaway sailors, escaped convicts, and other loose characters—the best known was one Rutherford, an English sailor, whom the Maoris forced to stay with them, tattooed, gave two daughters of a chief to wife, and kept among them for years, living in all outward respects like a savage, till at last he made his escape. That he did not quite sink spiritually to the level of his captors is shown by the interesting account of their habits and customs which he dictated to Prof. G. L. Craik, afterward incorporated by him in his valuable New-Zealanders of 1830. In every way the most remarkable was the famous Frederick Edward Maning. What motive—whim, disappointment, disgust with civilization, or latent savagery in himself—induced an educated man of superior abilities to cast in his lot with a race of cannibals has not transpired. A son of Anak, and possessing rare force of character, he was able for many years to hold his own in a community whose laws were more terrible than lawlessness. Such a man can never have been other than an alien at heart, but with his Maori wives, and conforming to Maori usages (cannibalism, it is to be hoped, excepted), he was outwardly a barbarian. he too broke away at last, and when colonization advanced, his knowledge and experience amply fitted him for the difficult post of a native land court judge. It fitted him still better for writing the most vivid account of a native race that has ever been thrown into literature. A more pathetic case is that of a professor of classics in Columbia College, New York, who, from disgust with the world, led a life of savage isolation in Queensland, where fifteen years ago he was speared by the blacks. The North American continent has seen crowds of such men. Daniel Boone was a type of the trapper who was half Indian. General Sam Houston, who had been adopted by the Cherokees as a boy, returned to his adopted father's tribe after he had made himself unpopular in Congress, assumed its dress, and lived with it for