1 54 



A USTRAL. IS/A ILL USTRA TED. 



botany and zoology, mathematics, physics, veterinary science, physical geography, meteoro- 

 logy and other kindred branches of study. 



In close contiguity to Canterbury and Christ's Colleges are the Museum and the 

 Botanic Gardens, the main entrance to the latter commanded by a fine statue of the 

 late Mr. W. S. Moorhouse, a popular Superintendent of the province, to whom the 

 Museum, as well as the Lyttelton railway tunnel, owes its origin. But if the enterprising 

 Superintendent conceived and inaugurated the Museum, it was the late Sir Julius von 

 Haast, who, as Curator for the first twenty-five years of its existence, brought it to its 



present high state of excel- 

 lence. In its technological 

 department it has, as yet, no 

 rival in the colony. In fact, 

 it is a museum of which 

 both Christchurch and New 

 Zealand at large may justly 

 be proud. The mammal-room 

 is filled with rows of cases 

 containing by far the best 

 collection of specimens of 

 natural history yet formed 

 in the country. The tech- 

 nological - room contains a 

 valuable metallurgical series, 

 and interesting illustrations 

 of the ceramic art, the steel 

 and iron manufactures, engi- 

 neering, ship - building and 

 textile skill. In the room 



devoted to osteology there is a fine grouping of skeletons, including a gorilla, a 

 giant python from India, and articulated human skeletons, besides typical skulls of 

 the various races of the genus homo. In addition there are separate rooms for 

 fossils, paintings and plaster-casts of statuary and antiquities, while both geology and 

 ornithology are adequately represented. We have left to the last two specialities of 

 the Museum, namely, the moa-room and the Maori house. In the former stand two 

 splendid specimens of the dinornis maximus, twelve feet three inches high, as well as 

 other specimens ranging from the size of a small emu to that of a giraffe. That the 

 moa, although now extinct, existed at one time in very considerable numbers in some 

 districts, may be inferred from the .fact that a search expedition, organized by Dr. von 

 Haast in the year 1866, obtained enough bones of this gigantic bird to fill an immense 

 waggon. F r a long time indeed, until within the last few months it was believed 

 that living specimens of the moa might still be discovered in that almost inaccessible 

 mountainous region on the south-west and western coasts of Otago, where even the 

 Maori, in all probability, never penetrated. The expedition of Mr. Reischek, the Austrian 

 naturalist, who spent several months of the years 1887 and 1888 in that solitary country, 



THE STATUE OF JOHN ROBERT GODLEY. 



