564 Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



been repeatedly assured by old Maoris that they had eaten 

 the flesh of the moa in their youth ; and they seemed well 

 acquainted with the habits of the birds. They have a proverb, 

 "Buna i te liuna a tc moa" (Hidden with the hiding of the 

 moa), to express a clumsy attempt at concealment, as they 

 say that the birds, when hunted, would often try to hide them- 

 selves ainong bushes quite inadequate to enclose their bodies, 

 just as tlie ostrich is said to do. 



The Waikanae natives assert that their fathers, even sixty 

 or seventy years ago, not only ate moa's flesh, but that they 

 also used to catch young ones and keep them as pets. Mr. 

 Wilson, too, who kept the hotel, and who came to the colony 

 about the year 1830, always asserted that he had not only 

 seen live moas on the Nelson side of the Strait, but that, on 

 one occasion, he and his mates caught a young one and sent 

 it as a present to a gentleman at Sydney, though he could not 

 tell whether it reached there. I have also apparently reliable 

 evidence of the birds having been both heard and seen alive in 

 the neighbourhood of Collingwood as late as 1857 or 1858, 

 and of one being cooked at a Maori feast at Taupo not long 

 previously. 



Besides the instances mentioned in my paper, read on the 

 22nd January, 1882, of gigantic birds, answering to the descrip- 

 tion of moas, having been seen by settlers in this part of New 

 Zealand, I lately heard of a man who asserts that he saw two 

 of them a few miles inland of Marton within the last thirty 

 years. In all these cases the reports have come from ignora,nt 

 labouring -men (newly - arrived immigrants), who were not 

 likely to have heard of moas. 



When I came to Wanganui, there were several young totara- 

 trees on a flat below Putiki Pa which the Eev. E. Taylor told 

 me had been planted to mark the sites of Maori graves. They 

 were at that time fully 30ft. high, but when I surveyed the 

 place in 1863 they were so deeply buried in an advancing 

 sandhill that only a few feet of their tops were visible, and 

 even these have long since been covered up, and the foot of 

 the hill is two or three chains beyond them. In the same 

 way I saw a nice patch of pine-bush on the late Captain 

 Ehodes's run, south of the Turakina Eiver, which in 1858 was 

 being buried in sand, and which a few years later had quite 

 disappeared. 



On the north side of the Wanganui Eiver, just below the 

 town, there was, in 1851, a large and high sandhill, on which 

 the artillerymen stationed here used to set up their mai'k when 

 they practised with cannon and mortars from the old York 

 Stockade. This sandhill has long since been nearly all blown 

 into the Wanganui Eiver, to the detriment of the navigation, 

 and its site is now occupied by the flat on which the new gaol 



