116 ANIMALS OF THE PAST 



lizards that kept guard while he slept, and on the 

 approach of man wakened the Moa, who immediately 

 rushed upon the intruders and trampled them to death. 

 None of the Maoris had seen this bird, but they had 

 seen and somewhat irreverently used for making parts 

 of their fishing tackle, bones of its extinct relatives, and 

 these bones they declared to be as large as those of an ox. 



About the same time another missionary, the Rev. 

 Richard Taylor, found a bone ascribed to the Moa, 

 and met with a very similar tradition among the 

 natives of a near-by district, only, as the foot of the 

 rainbow moves away as we move toward it, in his case 

 the bird was said to dwell in quite a different locality 

 from that given by the natives of East Cape. While, 

 however, the Maoris were certain that the Moa still 

 lived, and to doubt its existence was little short of a 

 crime, no one had actually seen it, and as time went on 

 and the bird still remained unseen by any explorer, hope 

 became doubt and doubt certainty, until it even became 

 a mooted question whether such a bird had existed 

 within the past ten centuries, to say nothing of having 

 lived within the memory of man. 



But if we do not know the living birds, their remains 

 are scattered broadcast over hillside and plain, concealed 

 in caves, buried in the mud of swamps, and from these 

 we gain a good idea of their size and structure, while 

 chance has even made it possible to know something 

 of their color and general appearance. This chance 

 was the discovery of a few specimens, preserved in ex- 

 ceptionally dry caves on the South Island, which not 

 only had some of the bones still united by ligaments, 

 but patches of skin clinging to the bones, and bearing 

 numerous feathers of a chestnut color tipped with 

 white. These small, straggling, rusty feathers are not 

 much to look at, but when we reflect that they have 



