Of the numerous Maori-speaking New Zealanders who have studied at first hand the customs and traditions and beliefs of the native race, the most thorough and scientific in method, and the most industrious and copious in recording collected facts, was the late Mr. Elsdon Best. He was a truly great man, a man of strong individuality and natural gifts, who had seen much of frontier life in his day and who was peculiarly fitted by temperament and talent for this research duty which so completely occupied the greater part of his career. His first close study was the life of the Urewera tribes, who retained in their mountain and forest land primitive customs and thought long after most other tribes had adopted pakeha ways and faiths. The thoroughness of his investigations during his life in the Urewera, or Tuhoe Land, resulted in the publication of many volumes that remain as a splendid memorial to an ancient warrior race. Later, his field of research was enlarged, and he wrote Museum Bulletins and Polynesian Society contributions that cover practically every phase of Maori life and culture. Elsdon Best's greatly-varied and useful life closed in Wellington, in his native province, in 1931, at the age of seventy-five.

Tall, lean, short-bearded, with the long, easy stride of the out-of-doors man, the figure of Elsdon Best was a familiar one in Wellington City in the later years of his life. It was easy, even for a stranger, to pick him out as a man bred in the open lands, accustomed to gaze out over wide expanses of country, and to cover the ground with the gait of an old campaigner. Many a swag the square muscular shoulders had carried in their day, many a league of mountain trail had developed that Maori lope. The early settler's life, years of work with axe and saw in the bush, thousands of miles of travel by horse and foot, had all in their ways gone to shape that spare, capable frame, and to give “Te Peehi” that distinguishing air of independence and self-reliance. He was a well-tried veteran of the adventurous life in many fields before he entered upon the absorbing study of his Maori fellow-New Zealanders that filled his hard-working days and nights until the end. For such men as Elsdon Best the days and nights are never long enough to get all the work in hand completed. There is always the task ahead that is the most absorbing pursuit in life, a task of pleasure that is never finished. The publication of one monograph after another, and its quick appreciation by the scientific world, was Best's chief reward. Like most original workers of his kind, his material reward was very small in proportion to the value of his painstaking research and the volume of his output.