676 Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



now. If the translation is correct, it is evidence that those 

 old villagers lived on the bank of the great lake, and handed 

 down the name from some far off time when totaras grew on 

 the hills instead of tussock and birch. 



On the Bullock Hills, a few miles away, I found what is 

 known as a Maori oven, and near it, on the surface, a patch of 

 moa gizzard-stones ; and during my ten years at Te Anau I 

 found — away from the lake— several such scraps of history 

 which could not have been all coincidences. 



On the south of Te Anau, a few feet above high water, 

 patches of gizzard-stones are quite easy to find — after a fern 

 fire — lying on the surface of alluvial soil quite apart from other 

 stones, for, of course, such is the only place in which they 

 could be identified in a stony country hke that. They are of 

 any size from that of peas up to small hen-eggs, probably 

 representing different sizes or ages of birds, and they tell 

 the story of how the birds died there, or the hunter emptied 

 out the gizzards he wanted to carry away for food ; and it 

 is evident that they were never washed by waves or driven by 

 streams or glaciers, or they would have been scattered. So 

 Te Anau remains about the same level since the moa's time, 

 while Manapouri has gone down 100 ft. at least, for I do not 

 remember finding any moa traces on that lower plain. 



There was an old village at Te Anau occupied perhaps as 

 late as 1840, but also for a very long time previously, as shown 

 by the distance of some of the sites away from the slowly 

 receding lake and its driftwood. Yet within a stone's 

 throw of the lake, between the httle dunes, a party of us 

 found a basketful of big charred knuckles and broken moa- 

 bones, with the charcoal in the fireplace still on the sur- 

 face, as if it had been used only a few years before. When 

 I first went up there arrow-heads and pieces of moa-bone 

 were common finds. Spear-heads most people call them ; 

 but no native would lash a rudely chipped stone on the end 

 of a spear for penetration — the lashiug alone would destroy 

 it for that. He would sooner point the stick like the Aus- 

 tralians ; and every boy knows the necessity of a weight on 

 the point of his arrow. The native evidently did lash those 

 heads on something, and I cannot think of anything else 

 but a big arrow for the sake of the weight to strike a power- 

 ful blow, which in my experience is most effective in stunning 

 or stopping an animal. 



Some one has written that those charred bones were used 

 for " firewood," but that is so easily settled by experiment 

 that it would not be worth mentioning but to show that some 

 one is always willing to tangle the ends of every question. At 

 Te Anau traces of trees are as old as the hills, and probably 

 driftwood has always been abundant since then, so that there 



