ous regulation. Many of the barbarous nations of antiquity had each
a method of cutting the hair peculiar to itself; and it was sometimes
accounted the deepest mark of servitude which a conqueror could impose
when he compelled the violation of this sacred rule of national manners.

We have a remnant of these old feelings in the reverence with which his
beard is regarded by a Turk of the present day. It is recorded, too,
that no reform which Peter the Great of Russia essayed to introduce
among his semi-barbaric subjects was so pertinaciously resisted as his
attempt to abbreviate their beards.

Marsden, on asking a New Zealander what he conceived the atua to be, was
answered--"An immortal shadow." Although possessed, however, of the
attributes of immortality, omni-presence, invisibility, and supreme
power, he is universally believed to be in disposition merely a
vindictive and malignant demon.

When one of the missionaries had one day been telling a number of them
of the infinite goodness of God, they asked him if he was not joking
with them. They believe that whenever any person is sick, his illness is
occasioned by the atua, in the shape of a lizard, preying upon his
entrails; and, accordingly, in such cases, they often address the most
horrid imprecations and curses to the invisible cannibal, in the hope of
thereby frightening him away. They imagine that at other times he amuses
himself in entangling their nets and oversetting their canoes. Of late
years they have suspected that he has been very angry with them for
having allowed the white men to obtain a footing in their country, a
proof of which they think they see in the greater mortality that has
recently prevailed among them. This, however, they at other times
attribute to the God of the Christians, whom they also denounce,
accordingly, as a cruel being, at least to the New Zealander. Sometimes
they more rationally assign as its cause the diseases that have been
introduced among them by the whites. Until the whites came to their
country, they say, young people did not die, but all lived to be so old
as to be obliged to creep on their hands and knees.

The white man's God they believe to be altogether a different being from
their own atua. Marsden, in one of his letters, relates a conversation
he had upon this subject with some of the chiefs' sons who resided with
him in New South Wales. When he told them that there was but one God,
and that our God was also the