200 MUTTON BIRDS 



minds,' says Spencer, but I believe our national 

 mind is rather supine than reluctant. The idea 

 has gone abroad that most of our remarkable 

 species are extinct, and that the remainder are 

 doomed, but these beliefs are erroneous. 



Our avifauna may yet exist in New Zealand, 

 as do my native plants on Tutira. These have 

 been watched for thirty years, and during 

 that period, to my knowledge, but one has 

 disa2)peared. 



Certainly they have been driven from soils and 

 sites, useful to man, but still survive on preci- 

 pices and barren lands, and what is the Westland 

 National Park but a series of precipices'? and 

 what are Stewart Island and the far southern 

 groups but barren lands ^ It is on such natural 

 sanctuaries as these that I advocate the efficient 

 protection of our avifauna, and the enforcement 

 of laws excellent in themselves but at the back o ' 

 beyond not worth the paper on which they are 

 printed. In its birds, each generation has but a 

 life interest; no more than sea or sky do they 

 belong to any period. They are property entailed 

 and to be transmitted age to age inviolate. Their 

 annihilation, is in very truth wrong done, not to 

 ourselves, or in our own time alone. Civilization 

 succeeds civilization as do the seasons of our 

 mortal life, cities are razed and on their ruins 

 others rise, knowledge destroyed can be again 

 attained, but the extinction of species is an ever- 

 lasting blank — a loss that time itself cannot 

 repair. 



