214 Transactions. — Zoology. 



teresting island. Perhaps I ought to have termed it the 

 " Shores of Scinde Island," for it is upon the shores rather 

 than upon the hills that one finds by far the greater part of 

 the wild life here. I say " wild " advisedly, for it is with the 

 wild folk that I wish to deal, whether they be native — whose 

 forbears have swum, crawled, or flown here since the land 

 first rose as marshes from a shallow Pliocene sea — or the 

 horde of familiar European types of wild life that have come 

 in the track of civilisation. 



Therefore, beginning with the highest forms, our first wild 

 type is that familiar savage the common grey rat. I need 

 scarcely tell you that rats are common in Napier. Long 

 years, ago, when the first traders came to Napier, the slim- 

 built Kiore maori, the true native rat, held possession. 

 Whether it was ever really common here I cannot say, but 

 its bones have been found plentiful in the piles of shells, 

 bones, and other matter that mark the old Maori camps, or 

 " kitchen-middens " as they are sometimes called, which have 

 been found on many parts of the Napier hills. Only the 

 other day, as I roamed over the new sections of the late 

 Mr. Colenso's property, I noticed that some one, in peeling off 

 the sod to form a garden, had laid bare one of these shell- 

 heaps. I could find no bone fragments of any sort, they 

 having probably long ago rotted away to their original lime, 

 but of shells there were a great abundance — of the cockles, 

 pipis, pupus, pawas, &c, so common on our coasts. I sup- 

 pose this relic of very old times will have to give place to an 

 assemblage of foreign shrubs and alien weeds, unappreciated 

 save perhaps as a means of paving a garden-path. With 

 these traders came rats, whether our familiar grey Norwegian 

 or the black Polynesian, or both, I am not sure. It is certain 

 that for a time the black rat swarmed all over the countrv, 

 driving out (we suppose) the brown Kiore maori, for even now 

 in bush districts the black rat is common, though vanishing, 

 with the clearing, before the fiercer Norwegian. We still 

 have them in the small patches of bush that are found in 

 the gullies of our poorer uplands some eighteen miles from 

 Napier. They have a different gait to the grey rat ; one that 

 we caught in the open hopped more than ran, in the fashion 

 of a kangaroo. I am afraid the only good point that I can 

 bring forward for this grey Viking of ours is that he is a great 

 devourer of snails. 



In some of the ruder walls that prop our Napier gardens — 

 those built just of ragged crags of limestone and uncemented 

 — the crannies are used as cave-dwellings by the rats. In a 

 Coote Koad wall they are liter-ally crammed with the broken 

 shells of Helix aspersa, the garden snail, cracked and devoured 

 by these rapacious rodents. The smaller, flatter, shining,. 



