270 Transactions. — Zoology. 



bird, which some persons would have us think the ancestral 

 Maori had bred and utilized as an egg-producer in some former 

 home of the Polynesian people ? 



Dr. Dieffenbach, about 1839 or 1840, was told that if he 

 attempted to ascend Mount Egmont these creatures would 

 destroy him. Allowing, for argument, that the moa was a 

 barn-door fowl, why did not Dr. Dieffenbach find it on Mount 

 Egmont ? or, when he saw the hen in the Maori villages, why 

 did not the Maori say, " This hen will kill you on Mount 

 Egmont if you break the tapu of that sacred place " ? 



Again, how do we account for the tradition of the bringing 

 in canoes from Hawaiki of the dog, rat, and pukeko (Poiphyrio 

 melanotics), but no moa? On the contrary, Ngahue is said to 

 have killed the moa, and taken by one account its skin, by 

 another its potted flesh, in a calabash from New Zealand to 

 Hawaiki, and told of the land of the greenstone and the 

 moa.* 



If the Maori knew the Dinornis, sp., as the moa previous 

 to Captain Cook introducing the domestic fowl to their notice, 

 then we can readily see that it would be very unlikely they 

 would call the small domestic hen by the same name of " moa," 

 for, if the Maori had not at that time the living moa, yet they 

 still had the bones and the remains of this gigantic bird of many 

 varieties, the largest of which were dangerous to their most 

 active warriors. With the Polynesians of the other islands it 

 was different, for they had not the moa with them, yet may 

 have kept a remembrance of a bird called moa, which was 

 farmed by man as a food-product. When they obtained the 

 domestic fowl — say, after the Maori exodus — and saw the useful 

 properties of this bird, they may have thought it the bird 

 mentioned in the traditions of their people— the lost bird, the 

 moa. Note the Maori tradition of the wonderful bird Moa- 

 hura-manu (the red-feathered bird moa), who, by drinking up 

 the waters of the Deluge, saved the people who had fled for 

 safety to the great hill, Hikurangi (see " Ancient History of 

 the Maori," vol. hi., p. 49). There is also a saying that the 

 moa was lost at the time of the Deluge — i.e., long ago. 



Dieffenbach, in 1839, says the Maoris informed him of a 

 food which their ancestors ate before the introduction of the 

 pig. It was " ngarara with a general name" (additional 

 words?). This, being the common name for reptile or insect, 

 was thought by Dieffenbach to mean a lizard which was not 

 then found on the mainland — the tuatara {Sphenodon punc- 

 tatum) — a specimen of which he ultimately obtained from a 

 European, after offering the Maoris great rewards if they would 

 get him one. Now, Dieffenbach caused this matter of the 



* Trans. N.Z. Inst., vol. xxvi., p. 50G. 



