4522 THE ZooLoctst—JUuLy, 1875. 
stop the holes in a large canoe, for letting the water out; anda 
square piece of wood, made of totara (Podocarpus totara), called 
tahatiki whaka, used to fasten the sides of a canoe. 
9. Also portions of a matiha, or fighting spear, made of manuka, 
and several other wooden implements.* 
However, besides the few pieces of moa bones which might 
accidentally have been brought into the cave from the outside, 
there was nothing which could prove that there had been a regular 
occupation by the moa hunters. I therefore set the labourers to 
work to go through the agglomeratic bed once more, and I was 
delighted to find, very soon, that this time my expectations were 
not doomed to disappointment. After having passed through that 
bed, which I found to be here six inches thick, another ash bed of 
a thickness of three inches was reached, in which I obtained several 
moa bones, some of them calcined, others in a splendid state of 
preservation, belonging to Euryapteryx rheides and Meionornis 
didiformis, as well as some pieces of charred wood. Proceeding 
with the utmost care, several large stones were reached covered 
with several inches of sand, some of them blackened or split by the 
action of the fire, and placed in such a position as to show that 
evidently an oven had here been excavated in the sands, these 
stones, like the remains of the meal taken here, having probably 
been trampled repeatedly over, and before the ash and dirt beds 
had been deposited above them. In digging round this spot 
I obtained the upper mandible of Aptornis defossor in a fine state 
of preservation, and a quantity of moa bones, also two wooden 
sticks made of pukatea for producing fire: this simple apparatus, 
the only one found in the cave, has the peculiarity that fire—instead 
of being obtained by friction lengthwise—was procured by giving 
the upper stick a turning motion. However, I may add that this was 
not the only mode by which the moa hunting population obtained 
fire, as in the same lower beds fire-sticks of the other kind were also 
found, resembling, in this respect, those belonging to the upper or 
mollusk-eating population, which are used at the present day by 
* T owe a great deal of this information to Hone Taahu and Tamati Ngakahu, 
two skilful Maori artificers of the Ngatiporou tribe, Poverty Bay, Northern Island, 
who, for some months past, have been oceupied at the Canterbury Museum with the 
necessary preparations for the erection of a Maori house, carved and painted in the 
original style of ancient Maori art, now fast dying out. As they come from a part of 
New Zealand where the ancient native customs have been retained longest, their 
information may be considered very reliable.—J. H. 
