360 ANIMAL LIFE IN NEW ZEALAND 



the abundance of remarkable birds, many of them flight- 

 less, but also in the fact that there are no snakes in this 

 vast area no crocodiles, no tortoises only fourteen 

 small kinds of lizard (seven Geckoes and seven Skinks), 

 and only one species of frog (and that only ever seen by 

 a very few persons) ! There were fish in the rivers when 

 settlers arrived there, but none very remarkable. Insects 

 and flies of every kind, scorpions, spiders, centipedes, land- 

 snails and earthworms were all flourishing in the forests of 

 New Zealand a thousand years ago, serving in large 

 measure as the food of birds, fish and lizards. The great 

 island continent of Australia, 1500 miles away, is peculiar 

 enough in its living products, quite unlike the rest of the 

 world in its egg-laying duck-mole and spiny ant-eater, and 

 in its abundant and varied population of pouched mammals 

 or marsupials, emphasised by the absence (except for two 

 or three peculiar little mice and the late-arrived black- 

 fellow and bush-dog) of the regular type called " placental " 

 mammals which inhabit the rest of the world. The rest of 

 the world except New Zealand ! Strange as Australia is, 

 New Zealand is yet stranger. Long as the isolation of 

 Australia has endured, and archaic and primitive in essen- 

 tial characters as is its living freight of animals and plants 

 navigated (as it were) in safety and isolation to our present 

 days, yet New Zealand has a still more primitive, a more 

 ancient cargo. When we divide the land surfaces of the 

 earth according to their history as indicated by the nature 

 of their living fauna and flora and their geological struc- 

 ture, and the fossilised remains of their past inhabitants, it 

 becomes necessary to separate the whole land surface into 

 two primary sections : (a) New Zealand, and () the rest 

 of the world, " Theriogcea," or the land of beasts 

 (mammals). Then we divide Theriogcea into (i) the land 

 of Marsupials (Australia), and (2) the land of Placentals 

 (the rest of the world). This last great area is divisible 



