262 BIG ANIMALS 



enormous bird who was to the ostrich as the giraffe is to 

 the antelope ; a monstrous emu, as far surpassing the 

 ostriches of to-day as the ostriches surpass all the other 

 fowls of the air. Yet the moa, though now extinct, is in 

 the strictest sense quite modern, a contemporary very 

 likely of Queen Elizabeth or Queen Anne, exterminated by 

 the Maoris only a very little time before the first white 

 settlements in the great southern archipelago. It is even 

 doubtful whether the moa did not live down to the days of 

 the earliest colonists, for remains of Maori encampments 

 are still discovered, with the ashes of the fireplace even now 

 unscattered, and the close-gnawed bones of the gigantic 

 bird lying in the very spot where the natives left them after 

 their destructive feasts. So, too, with the big sharks. 

 OUT modern carcharodon, who runs (as I have before noted) 

 to forty feet in length, is a very respectable monster indeed, 

 as times go ; and his huge snapping teeth, which measure 

 nearly two inches long by one and a half broad, would 

 disdain to make two bites of the able-bodied British sea- 

 man. But the naturalists of the ' Challenger ' expedition 

 dredged up in numbers from the ooze of the Pacific similar 

 teeth, five inches long by four wide, so that the sharks to 

 which they originally belonged must, by parity of reasoning, 

 have measured nearly a hundred feet in length. This, no 

 doubt, beats our biggest existing shark, the rhinodon, by 

 some thirty feet. Still, the ooze of the Pacific is a quite 

 recent or almost modern deposit, which is even now being 

 accumulated on the sea bottom, and there would be really 

 nothing astonishing in the discovery that some representa- 

 tives of these colossal carcharodons are to this day swim- 

 ming about at their lordly leisure among the coral reefs of 

 the South Sea Islands. That very cautious naturalist, Dr. 

 Giinther, of the British Museum, contents himself indeed 

 by merely saying : 'As we have no record of living indi- 



