[..■ 



Emu 

 Oct 



Review. 



" THE ANIMALS OF NEW ZEALAND." 



[" The Animals of New Zealand : an Account of the Colony's Air-breathing 

 Vertebrates." By Captain Hutton, F.R.S., President of the New Zealand Institute, 

 and James Drummond. Christchurch, Wellington, and Dunedin, N.Z. , Melbourne 

 and London : Whitcombe and Tombs Limited. 1904. Pp. i.-xiv. , 15-381.] 



New Zealand has a fauna and flora so peculiarly its own that 

 every attempt to solve the problems connected with either branch 

 of the study must be welcomed by naturalists, ornithologists more 

 particularly. Linked by many ties to the flora of the North- 

 Eastern i\ustralian coast and to New Guinea, by geological 

 evidence as well, and sundered only (in the New Guinea portion 

 of the belt to which it evidently belonged) by a narrow deep 

 belt of sea (according to Dr. A. R. Wallace's physical map) from 

 the Malay Archipelago, the question arises how it was that, 

 as the authors of the present volume point out, up to the end 

 of the Cretaceous age and well into the Tertiary, " so far as animal 

 life was concerned, it [New Zealand] was the abomination of 

 desolation, as the forests contained no birds, and the fern-lands 

 no lizards except the Tuatara." Australia has evidences of many 

 of the older forms of life — animals that have passed from northern 

 zones (where most are now extinct) to this continent, that these 

 bore probably so different a shape to what it does to-day. Did 

 bird and animal life pass down to the mainland first, and, if it 

 did, how account for the fact that so few forms passed over " the 

 bridge " that linked it then to our mainland ? Moa and our 

 own form of Dinornis being closely allied, how does it come that 

 the winged birds that did pass have so far differentiated from 

 Australian species of the same families ? And if some tentative 

 speculations in Captain Hutton's paper on Cormorants have 

 any validity (vide The Emu, vol. iii., part i, pp. 1-8), and the 

 theoretical opinion that these particular forms came by way of 

 South x^merica — and intermediate islands — is not the problem 

 more involved than ever ? That N.Z. birds should have more 

 sombre clothing is hardly so remarkable, though Messrs. Hutton 

 and Drummond specially call attention to it. There seems an 

 unwritten law, in Austral-Malaysian regions, that the further 

 north you go the brighter the birds' plumage becomes — and 

 vice versa. 



Of course, in the present handsomely got up work, one which 

 is rather a popularly scientific than a scientifically popular book, 

 the authors have not attempted to go into such abstruse questions. 

 They have in preference confined themselves to matters which, 

 while helpful to the naturalist, will be of value and great interest 

 to the general public. 



The section relating to Aves forms the greater portion of the 

 book, and, as it is well illustrated and printed, may be cordially 

 recommended to all. About 190 species, which is probably a 

 full list of N.Z. birds (many Australian also), are described, 



