JOHN RUTHERFORD 99 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