GIANT BIRDS. 239 



" A main interest of such a find lies not in the power of supply- 

 ing museums with specimens of what is rapidly disappearing from 

 the face of the world, but in the possibility of finding species 

 of Moa that have not hitherto been tabulated. Whether any 

 new species have been brought to light on this occasion the 

 experts will not say until there has been time to make a careful 

 study of the bones, nor do they venture on any theory to account 

 for there being so many individual birds dead in that one place, 

 where there appears to be no room for the explanations offered 

 in connection with previous great finds. The date of these birds 

 appears to be earlier than that of the coming of the Maoris into 

 New Zealand, say five or six hundred years ago, as the Maori 

 memory appears to have in it no trace of feasting on these giant 

 Moas, but celebrates the rat-hunt in its ancient heroic song. And 

 your readers may picture their appearance by noticing the fact 

 that one of the recently found bones must have belonged to a 

 Moa fourteen feet high ! " 



Note. — For further information on this interesting subject, the reader is 

 referred to a paper in Natural Science, October, 1892, by Mr. F. W. Hutton. 

 In a valuable paper, read before the Royal Geographical Society by Mr. H. O. 

 Forbes, March 13, 1893, the lecturer alluded to the important fact that bone 

 belonging to big extinct strutliious birds have been discovered in Patagonia. 

 This is interesting news as bearing upon the theory of a former Antarctic con- 

 tinent connecting Australia and New Zealand with South Africa, and perhaps 

 even with South America. After the lecture, to which we listened with great 

 interest, the subject was discussed by Mr. Slater, Dr. Giinther, and Dr. 

 Henry Woodward. For ourselves we can see no great difficulty in accepting 

 the theory that such a continent once existed, though it is out of harmony 

 with the now rather fashionable theory of " the permanence of ocean basins " 

 — a doctrine which seems to have been pressed too far. 



