300 ANTARCTICA: A VANISHED AUSTRAL LAND. 



islands as well as extended northward to unite with the southern 

 extremities of South America, i)erhaps with Africa, and with the 

 Mascarene, the Australian, and the New Zealand continental islands." 

 The larger evidence to which I then referred I purpose now to lay 

 before the readers of this Eeview. 



We find either still living or preserved fossil in the strata of their 

 Tertiary formations in regions of the Southern Hemisphere so widely 

 apart as the south of South America, the Madagascar region, Austra- 

 lia, and New Zealand inany forms of plants and animals unknown in 

 the Northern Hemisphere possessing so many characters in common 

 as to show at once that they are descended from the same stock. 



To commence with birds, the distribution of the ostrich group is 

 very remarkable. New Zealand, as it is scarcely necessary to remind 

 the reader, is celebrated for the remains of those extinct giants of the 

 family known as moas. Their bones are found all over the two main 

 islands of which that colony consists, and they might have been gath- 

 ered in the early years of its settlement by Europeans in vast numbers 

 from off the surface of the ground, especially in the interior of the prov- 

 inces of Canterbury and Otago, or from the sandy flats of the larger 

 rivers where they had become exposed by the action of the wind. 

 They have also been found in caves, under rock shelters, and in the 

 ancient kitchen middens of the natives, as well as exhumed in enor- 

 mous quantities from the peat bogs of both islands, where they have 

 been discovered huddled together in crowds of many hundreds. These 

 birds varied very greatly in size, the larger specimens attaining a stat- 

 ure of from 10 to 12 feet. They had bones of herculean j)roportions, and, 

 needless to say, they were quite unable to fly, being, indeed, devoid of 

 wings. Their feathers, which, singularly enough, have been preserved 

 to us in considerable numbers, show that each had an after shaft equal 

 in length to the primary plumes of their contour feathers — forming, as 

 it were, a double feather — a characteristic mark of the ostriches of the 

 Australian region, the emus and cassowaries ; and they all possessed, 

 on the metatarsal bone, articular pulleys for three toes instead of two, 

 as the African ostrich has. Australia also included in its bird fauna 

 of ancient days a giant ostrich, the Dromornis, and now possesses the 

 emu, while New Guinea reckons at the present time the cassowary — of 

 which one species crosses into Australia — among its wonderful bird 

 inhabitants. In the distant island of Madagascar also there flourished 

 once, though now extinct, a member of the same family, the ^liJpyornis, 

 a giant, if not in height, at all events in the bulk and dimensions of its 

 limbs, which appear to have exceeded those of even the most elephan- 

 tine of the moas. Yet another stately member, the Brontornis, lived 

 m early ages in southern Patagonia, a necessarily flightless bird, 

 which, as we know from its fossil remains, far excelled in stature even 

 the tallest of its New Zealand relatives. This remarkable group of 

 birds, therefore, we find occupied New Zealand, Australia, Madagas- 



