Field. — Date of the Extinction of the Moa. 567 



and, as I have never met with any statement to the contrary, 

 I beheve the information to be correct. If, then, the natives 

 of those islands, on seeing a bird of larger size than the other 

 land-birds with which they were acquainted, and with only im- 

 perfect powers of flight, gave it the name of "moa," it seems 

 to me that they must have had, in some way, a tradition of 

 a struthious bird, so called, having formerly existed, either 

 in the islands or in the country from which they themselves 

 had come. I see no reason why all the Europeans (mostly 

 uneducated men), who would not be likely to have heard of 

 the moa, \Yho, from time to time, have asserted that they have 

 seen gigantic birds in the colony, should be set down as liars, 

 or why the Maoris should be credited with having invented 

 yarns about the birds to please us pakehas. If the Maoris 

 never saw the bird, how should they have known that the 

 bones belonged to one, and not to a mammal ? and how should 

 they have been able to describe its appearance and habits so 

 correctly ? I noticed that several of the traditions quoted by 

 Captain Mair mentioned the birds as living in caves, and 

 having red eyes or heads. The frequency with which the 

 bones have been found in caves might give rise to the former 

 idea, but certainly not to the latter ; yet it is corroborated by 

 passages in the letters of Mr. Cotterell and Major Lockett ; 

 and in the travels of a Swedish naturalist, named Helmholz, 

 who visited Australia a few years back, I read that the 

 Queensland cassowaries, or some of them, have red heads, 

 and are nocturnal in their habits, hiding themselves in the 

 thickest forests during the day. It is curious that all the 

 Europeans who have reported having seen the birds seem to 

 have spoken of doing so either in the evening or very early 

 morning, and that what appears to have been their cry was 

 also only heard at night. 



It was from the Maoris that we learnt that the curious 

 little heaps or groups of quartz pebbles scattered about the 

 country were the crop-stones of the moa. But for the fact 

 that they called these collections of white pebbles imku 

 moa (moa's stomachs), and so led us to inquire, I doubt 

 whether the reason of such pebbles being always found in 

 such clusters, and so only, would have been likely to occur 

 even to highly scientific men, though the fact of the stones 

 being so collected had attracted general notice. Forty or 

 forty-five years ago the Wanganui Maoris spoke of the 

 existence of the bird in the vicinity of the Euahine Eange 

 as a certain fact, and some years later a party who had 

 gone up the Oroua Eiver on a prospecting expedition asserted 

 that they had seen a bird answering to the description. 



Again, when I mentioned that an old Maori had described 

 the bird to me, fully forty years ago, as fighting by standing on 



