INTRODUCTION 21 



helpless eggs and young, fell easy victims. In 

 these remote times, the small amount of interest 

 taken in what we may call living science, when 

 zoologists attached no importance whatever to the 

 geographical distribution of species, nor to the 

 equally significant phenomena of island faunae and 

 florae as bearing upon the question of the evolution 

 of specific forms, may reasonably be urged as an 

 excuse for the want of some efibrts being made 

 to preserve for posterity these interesting and 

 valuable relics of an ancient past. But this 

 extenuating circumstance cannot be pleaded as an 

 excuse for the almost universal work of exter- 

 mination that has been going on steadily and 

 surely through the present century; even after 

 the publication of the discoveries of Darwin and 

 Wallace, that not only changed the entire process 

 of zoological research, but brought out in vivid 

 suggestiveness the importance of those forms 

 which civilised man has been (consciously or not 

 makes no difierence) doing his best to stamp out. 

 More especially do we allude to the senseless crime 

 of extirpation which has been committed in New 

 Zealand and other antipodean lands, where species 

 after species has passed away, and others are still 

 surely following, without any rational efibrts being 



