xii DESCRIPTION OF THE FRONTISPIECE. 



inhabitants of the country, and that from the period when those Islands were taken possession of by man, 

 the race gradually diminished, and the colossal types were finally annihilated by human agency. That some 

 of the largest species were contemporary with the Maories, there can now be no reasonable doubt. Apart from 

 native traditions, and songs and tales in which allusions are made to the gigantic magnitude and flowing 

 plumage of the Moa, the collocation of calcined and half roasted bones of the Dinornis, of dogs, and of the human 

 species, in the ancient fire-heaps of the aborigines, and the unequivocal marks of the celt or axe of jade on some 

 of the tibiae, — the chips or cuts having evidently been made on the bones when recent, — afford incontrovertible 

 proof that the last of the Moas, like the last of the Dodos, was annihilated by human agency. 



From the remarkable size and strength of the thighs, legs, and feet of the Moas, it is clear that the hinder 

 limbs must have constituted powerful locomotive organs ; and when we consider the vast swarms of the largest 

 species which existed at some remote period, it seems highly probable that this family of colossal birds, — 

 a family unknown in any other part of the world, — -was not originally confined within the narrow geographical 

 limits of modern New Zealand, but ranged over a vast continent now submerged, and of which PhiUip and 

 Norfolk Islands, and Chatham and Auckland Islands, and those of New Zealand, are the culminating points. 



But whatever may be the result of future discoveries as to the relative age of the bone-deposits, or the 

 existence or extinction of any of the colossal species of Moa, or the former extension of the race over countries 

 now submerged, one astounding fact must ever remain unassailable — the vast preponderance of the class Aves 

 or Birds, that prevailed, and which still prevails, in the fauna of New Zealand, to the almost entire exclusion 

 of mammalia and reptiles. Any paljeontologist who saw only the collections sent over by my son, must have 

 been astonished at their extent and variety. I may venture to affirm that such an assemblage of the fossil 

 bones of birds was never before seen in Europe : nearly fifteen hundred specimens, collected from various parts 

 of the country, with scarcely any intermixture of the remains of any other class ; — it is a phenomenon as startling 

 as the exclusively reptilian character of the fauna of the Wealden epoch. But the favma of New Zealand, even 

 at the present time, presents a character as ornithic and as anomalous as its ancient one; for while there are 

 upwards of fifty or sixty genera of birds, there is but one indigenous mammalian quadruped known to naturalists 

 — a species of rat ! In this respect, therefore, as well as in its flora, in which ferns and other cellulosae of 

 peculiar types prevail to an extent unknown elsewhere, the country offers a striking example of that now 

 acknowledged fact in natural history — a centre or focus of creation of certain organic types. And this law, 

 with whose operation during the palaeozoic and secondary ages modern geological researcles have made us 

 familiar, appears to have continued in unabated energy to the present moment. 



From what has been advanced, it is manifest that the present geographical distribution of special groups 

 of terrestrial animals and plants, displays as many anomalies in the relative predominance of the different classes 

 and orders over certain areas, without relation to climatorial or other obvious physical conditions, as can be traced 

 in the natural records of the earlier ages of the world. The conclusion therefore forces itself upon the mind, that 

 throughout the vast periods of time to which our retrospective knowledge extends, the geological changes of 

 the earth's surface, and the appearance and obliteration of species and genera, have been governed by the same 

 physical and organic laws ; and that notwithstanding the variable conditions of the land and the water, indicated 

 by the sedimentary formations, there was at no period a greater discrepancy in the assemblages of certain types 

 of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, than exists at present. 



Of the nature of that law by which the extinction of a race of highly organized beings is determined, and 

 whose effects through innumerable ages palaeontology has in part revealed, we are as utterly ignorant as of that 

 which governs the first appearance of the minutest living animalcule which the powers of the microscope enable 

 us to descry ; both are veiled in inscrutable mystery, the results only are within the scope of our finite 

 comprehension.' 



' See the concluding part of Lecture VIII. § 46, Wonders of Geology, vol. ii. p. 890. 



