302 ANTARCTICA: A VANISHED AUSTRAL LAND. 



region also — clianicters, lie observes, "too well marked to be considered 

 accidental." * 



In tlie May number of The Fortuigbtly Review I have already drawn 

 attention to the fact that what now constitutes New Zealand was but 

 a small portion of a once far greater continental island — which I have 

 designated Antipodea — stretching south as far at least as the Mac- 

 quarie Islands, and embracing all those lying between them and the 

 Chatham Islands, as well as those to the northward as far as iSTew Cale- 

 donia, the Fiji, the Friendly, and the Kermadec islands — a fact de- 

 duced from the occurrence on these separated specks of land of a 

 common flora and fauna which could not have arrived there without a 

 land connection. On that occasion also, I spoke of the discovery in 

 the Chatham Islands — an unsubmerged portion of a once larger 

 region — of the remains of two birds, a tall coot [FuHca) and a giant 

 wood hen {Apkanapteryx)^ which had been i^reviously known only from 

 Mauritius, which is also an unsubmerged j)ortion of a greater conti- 

 nental island, comprising Bourbon, Rodriguez, Madagascar, and the 

 Seychelles. The wood hens, a group of rails entirely unknown in the 

 Northern Hemisphere, are in the Southern Hemisi)here absolutely con- 

 fined to the islands of the Mascarene and of the New Zealand archi- 

 pelagoes, which are separated from each other by nearly half the cir- 

 cumference of the globe. Dr. R. Bowdler Sharpe, speaking not long 

 ago on the "Geographical distribution of birds," at the Royal Institu- 

 tion, pointed out additional relationships (so far as their birds are con- 

 cerned) between these same widely disconnected areas. In the Island 

 of Bouibon there lived, till exterminated in comparatively recent times 

 by incursive Europeans, a very peculiar starling with a long, slightly 

 curved bill, the Fregiluptis, the sole species of its genus, of which 

 one of the very few examples that have been preserved may be 

 seen mounted in the bird gallery of the Natural History Museum at 

 South Kensington. It has. no near relatives except in New Zealand, 

 where the huia {HcteralocJia gouldi), a bird eciually peculiar and the 

 solitary representative of its genus, forms one of the most interesting 

 species of one of the most peculiar bird faunas of the world. The 

 huia is remarkable in that the shape, of the beak differs in the two 

 sexes in a most surprising manner in association with habits unique, I 

 believe so far as yet known, among the- feathered tribes. The bill of 

 the male is straight, i^owerful, and sharp; that of the female is in com- 

 parison exceedingly slender and strongly curved. Tlie straight-beaked 

 bird breaks up and chips oft' the bark and wood of trees, in quest of 

 the tunnels of the grubs and insects that form their food; while the 

 closely attendant female is keenly on the alert to thrust in its slender, 

 curved forceps — where the beak of its mate is useless — to extract each 

 nutritious morsel when discovered. Both are aberrant forms of their 

 family, and both are on excellent authority considered to be descend- 

 ants of the same ancestor. In the same two regions also, alone of all 



