Hutchinson. — On Scincle Island. 219 



draggled and dirty, with his great wings drooping useless, in a 

 garden down Emerson Street. How he must have longed for 

 a cleaving dive in clean salt-water, and a clear fly home to the 

 fish-strewn ridge of the Kidnappers. 



Of the cormorants, or shags, we have two species — the 

 black and the white-throated. The black shag is by far the 

 commonest ; one may see him all round the island, whether 

 stolidly watching the waves buffet the breakwater or gliding 

 low in the water up the swamp-channels. The white-throated 

 shag I have seen perched on the buoy of the outer anchorage, 

 and occasionally on the deserted punts moored above the 

 Petane Bridge. 



Of our local fishes I know too little to venture on a list of 

 them. But it is interesting to note the meeting of river-fish 

 and sea-fish on common ground (or rather water) in the chan- 

 nels about here. Of course, we all know that even our river- 

 fish wend seaward yearly to spawn, but one needs the sight 

 of them down here to realise it. This I had the pleasure of 

 doing a few days ago at the mouth of the New Cut. There, 

 under the silt-banks opposite the brickyards, I found a host 

 of the minnows or inanga, so common in our upland streams, 

 feeding amongst the tresses of a matted water-grass. And 

 with them were larger, darker forms that stole away into the 

 depths of the channel at my approach. They were "spotties," 

 those voracious little sea-fish so well known round the wharves 

 and harbours of our coast. 



After the fishes we come to the reptiles. Though of few 

 species, we have this class well represented in numbers by 

 the little brown lizards that swarm in the crannies of the 

 limestone. Turning to the Maori middens again, in them 

 have been found the bones of a great ancestor of these 

 lizards — in fact, the last living representative of those early 

 lizards the great Saurians. I allude to Sphenodon punctata, 

 the tuatara of the Maoris. Though once abundant, it is now 

 extinct on the mainland of New Zealand, being found only on 

 a few of the outlying islets. 



Of the Batrachians we have no native species on th& 

 island, but are well supplied with a beautiful immigrant — a 

 Frenchman, I believe — the golden-eyed green-garbed frog of 

 our marshes. I remember how delighted we were when the 

 first hoarse notes of a pioneer pair rose from our Woolshed 

 Swamp, some seventeen miles inland. Now, in their numbers, 

 their prelude blends to a low roar, sustained the day long 

 and far into the warm summer nights, making one understand 

 the feelings that prompted the French seigneurs to send their 

 peasants nightly to thrash the marshes. 



The reptiles are the last and lowest of the vertebrates. 

 Of the invertebrates, the highest members are the Tnnicata. 



