een leaves, and then placed
between heated stones to bake. But little of any other animal food is
consumed, birds being killed chiefly for their feathers, and pigs being
only produced on days of special festivity.

The first pigs were left in New Zealand by Cook, who made many attempts
to stock the country both with this and other useful animals, most of
whom, however, were so much neglected that they soon disappeared. Cook,
likewise, introduced the potato into New Zealand; and that valuable root
appears to be now pretty generally cultivated throughout the northern
island.

The only agricultural implements, however, which the natives possess are
of the rudest description; that with which they dig their potatoes being
merely a wooden pole, with a cross-bar of the same material fixed to it
about three feet from the ground. Marsden saw the wives of several of
the chiefs toiling hard in the fields with no better spade than this;
among others the head wife of the great Shungie, who, though quite
blind, appeared to dig the ground, he says, as fast as those who had
their sight, and as well, first pulling up the weeds as she went along
with her hands, then setting her feet upon them that she might know
where they were; and, finally, after she had broken the soil, throwing
the mould over the weeds with her hands.

The labours of agriculture in New Zealand are, in this way, rendered
exceedingly toilsome, by the imperfection of the only instruments which
the natives possess. Hence, principally, their extreme desire for iron.
Marsden, in the "Journal of his Second Visit," gives us some very
interesting details touching the anxiety which the chiefs universally
manifested to obtain agricultural tools of this metal. One morning, he
tells us, a number of them arrived at the settlement, some having come
twenty, others fifty miles. "They were ready to tear us to pieces," says
he, "for hoes and axes. One of them said his heart would burst if he
did not get a hoe."

They were told that a supply had been written for to England; but "they
replied that many of them would be in their graves before the ship would
come from England, and the hoes and axes would be of no advantage to
them when dead. They wanted them now. They had no tools at present, but
wooden ones to work their potato-grounds with; and requested that we
would relieve their present distress."

When he returned from his visit to Shukehanga, many of the natives of
that part o