162 Transactions. — Zoology. 



of the Maoris in New Zealand. The dodo of Mauritius 

 existed for seventy-three years only after the island was dis- 

 covered ; and the sea-cow of Behring Strait, which was living 

 in immense numbers in 1741, succumbed entirely in twenty- 

 seven years. The Maoris are supposed to have inhabited New 

 Zealand for about six hundred years,''' so that we must put 

 the probable extinction of the moa in the North Island at four 

 or five hundred years ago. 



In the South Island there are no Maori names of places 

 containing the word moa;i and Mr. A. Mackay, the Eev. 

 J. F. H. Wohlers, and the Eev. J. W. Stack all agree that the 

 natives have no traditions of the moas further than that they 

 were destroyed by a fire, called the fire of Tamatea, which 

 swept over the Canterbury Plains some five hundred years 

 ago — evidently an echo of the legend of the North Island 

 already mentioned. According to Mr. Stack tradition states 

 that the first occupants of the South Island were the Kahui- 

 tipua, a fabulous race of giants who ate men. They were de- 

 stroyed by Te Rapu-wai, who were soon followed, from the 

 North Island, by the Wai-taha. 



These two belonged probably to the saine tribe ; at any 

 rate, they were contemporaries, intermarried freely, were not 

 warlike, became numerous, and " covered the land like ants." 

 The Waitaha were exterminated by the Nga-ti-mamoe, who 

 crossed Cook Strait into the South Island about three hundred 

 years ago ; and the Ngatimamoe were, in their turn, destroyed 

 by the ancestors of the present natives — the Nga-i-tahu — about 

 two hundred or two hundred and fifty years ago. Very little 

 is known about Te Rapu-wai and Waitaha. Their traditions 

 perished with the extinction of their conquerors, the Nga- 

 timamoe, but the extinction of the moa, as well as the forma- 

 tion of the shell-heaps on the coast, are attributed sometimes 

 to one, sometimes to the other.]: It is evident that Hauma- 

 tangi, who told Mr. J. W. Hamilton that he had himself seen 

 the last moa, and the Rapaki (Lyttelton) Maori who told him 

 that his father had hunted the moa,§ were romancing. As also 

 was the sealer Meurant, who said that he had seen and eaten 

 moa's flesh at Port Molyneux as late as 1823. || We must 

 also consider as fabulous the Maori statements made to Mr. 



* Writers are of opinion that the ancestral records of the JTaoris of 

 the North Island prove from eighteen (Shortland) or twenty-five (Colenso) 

 to forty-six (J. White) generations since their first arrival. 



t Awamoa, near Oamaru, was so named by the Hon. W. Mantell. 



J Stack, Trans. N.Z. Inst., vol, x., p. 60, &c. Copied by Mr. White 

 in his " Ancient History of the Maori," vol. iii., p. 191. See, also, Man- 

 tell, Trans. N.Z. Inst., vol. xxi., p. 440. 



§ Trans. N.Z. Inst., vol. vii., p. 121. 



II Trans. N.Z. Inst.^ vol. vii., p. 121. 



