104 Transactions. — Zoology. 



eternal forces of the universe, and believing also that the time 

 must come when the sun will lose his heat, and all life on the 

 earth necessarily cease — have to contemplate a not very 

 distant future in which all this glorious earth — which for 

 untold millions of years has been slowly developing forms of 

 life and beauty, to culminate at last in man — shall be as if it 

 had never existed ; who are compelled to suppose that all the 

 slow growths of our race struggling towards a higher life, all the 

 agony of martyrs, all the groans of victims, all the evil and 

 misery and undeserved suffering of the ages, all the struggles 

 for freedom, all the efforts towards justice, all the aspirations 

 for virtue and the well-being of humanity, shall absolutely 

 vanish, and, ' like the baseless fabric of a vision, leave not a 

 wrack behind.' As contrasted with this hopeless and soul- 

 deadening belief, we, who accept the existence of a spiritual 

 world, can look upon the universe as a grand consistent whole, 

 adapted in all its parts to the development of spiritual beings, 

 capable of indefinite life and perfectibility. . . . We thus 

 feel that the Darwinian theory, even when carried out to its 

 extreme logical conclusion, not only does not oppose but lends 

 a decided support to a belief in the spiritual nature of man. 

 It shows how man's body may have been developed from that 

 of a lower animal form under the law of natural selection ; but 

 it also teaches us that we possess intellectual and moral 

 faculties which could not have been so developed, but must 

 have had another origin ; and for this origin we can only find 

 an adequate cause in the unseen universe of Spirit." 



Art. IV. — Notes on the Ornithology of New Zealand; with 

 an Exhibition of Bare Specimens. 



By Sir Walter L. Buller, K.C.M.G., D.Sc, B.B.S., &c. 



[Read before the Wellington Philosophical Society, 25th July, 1894.] 



When I had the pleasure of reading a paper before you on the 

 13th July, 1892, I referred to the steps that had been taken 

 by Mr. Ballance's Ministry, at the instance of our late 

 Governor, Lord Onslow, towards preserving the native avi- 

 fauna of New Zealand by setting apart island reserves and 

 placing them under strict supervision. Having taken an 

 active interest in these steps myself, naturally my first inquiry 

 on returning to the colony, in March last, was as to how far 

 the good intentions of the Government had been carried into 

 effect. I was indeed glad to find that the negotiations for 



