Henry. — Moa Farmers. 675 



for the habit of thinking above alluded to, we might easily 

 believe that the Madagascan moa was brought here by old- 

 time navigators, who could have also brought roots and fruit 

 and corn for its food, for we are not sure that the climate has 

 been the same since the moa's first arrival. The earth may 

 have taken a slight list to the south since then, and an age 

 of heat, unlike the cold, leaves no deep grooves behind, un- 

 less its marks may be in the recent cool and changing forest 

 trees. 



If we only knew of oxen by their bones and horns we 

 should not judge them easily farmed ; so there possibly need 

 have been no difficulty in taming the moas. The question is, 

 Did the men bring them here, or find them here when they 

 came? In the latter case the herds would have been too 

 tame for hunting, and it would have been only a matter of 

 butchering them when required ; and surely a people in- 

 telligent enough to build and provision a vessel to bring their 

 families over the sea — no matter from where — would have 

 had sense to see the value of the moas in time to save and 

 foster them, especially in such places as the Canterbury 

 Plains, where the various kinds could have been tended for 

 ages as we tend our sheep. 



That there were moa-hunters there need be no doubt, for 

 the arrow-heads alone would almost prove that ; but they 

 were probably recent Maoris developed into hunters of 

 peaceful men, and then following up their calling by hunt- 

 ing the moas off the earth. As for not finding human bones 

 with moas, we know how few of ours will be found with those 

 of our sheep, for instance, because the latter are everywhere, 

 with millions of better chances of finding favourable condi- 

 tions for preservation and ultimate discovery. 



At Manapouri Homestead, twelve miles from the lake of 

 that name, and perhaps 100 ft. above it, Mr. Mitchell used to 

 find stone tools and fragments enough to show that the place 

 had once been the site of an old village, and that was almost 

 proof that the lake was up there then. The " Long Valley ' 

 would have been the harbour, and the peninsula on which the 

 house is built would have sheltered the village from the north 

 wind. I think the outlet from a deep lake would hardly wear 

 at all when there are no stones to rattle down in floods ; but 

 in this case the Mararoa Eiver brought down material from 

 the drift hills to form Manapouri Plain, and then supplied 

 the stones to cut down the outlet from the lake; while Te 

 Anau, having no such officious river, has long remained about 

 the same. The level of this old village would probably make 

 them into one great lake, bounded on the south by the Taki- 

 timos, which I heard translated as "great margin," which 

 would have been very appropriate then, but is meaningless 



