Wellington Philosophical Society. 553 
Mr. Kirk thought the tree was identical with Pisonia umbellifera, and that the sticky 
exudation did act like birdlime in getting those large seeds carried on the feathers of 
birds. 
3. Dr. Hector made some interesting remarks on earthquake disturbances in the 
ocean, referring to what he had said at the previous meeting, that the tidal disturbances 
felt on these shores about the time of the Sunda eruptions were due to their influence. 
The editor of the “New Zealand Journal of Science” had objected that, as the great 
Australian continent intervened directly between the Straits of Sunda and New Zealand, 
no tidal wave from that cause could have been felt here without being felt much more 
forcibly along the southern and western shores of Australia and Tasmania, and suggested 
that the disturbances felt here were probably due to other submarine movements in the 
Pacific. Late reports showed that the tidal disturbance was very marked on the west 
coast of Tasmania; and the disturbances felt here were found to coincide suggestively with 
the succession of earthquake shocks that followed the eruptions at Sunda. The retardation 
or acceleration of the tidal swell by those earthquake shocks would act and react in various 
directions, thereby causing disturbances of varying intensity on all the shores of these 
islands. An extraordinary phenomenon to which he particularly drew attention was, that 
atmospheric disturbances as self-registered by a delicately-adjusted barograph coincided 
remarkably in the sudden jerks on several days ‘with the recorded eruptions at Sunda, 
beginning on the evening of the 27th August, and recurring on four or five days. These 
barometrical jerks and curves were exhibited by a diagram, with dates and hours given ; 
and Dr. Hector moreover pointed out that these readings in Wellington corresponded with 
similar jerks in the curves recorded by a self-registering barometer at Dunedin, showing 
that they were produced by a fast-moving influence that traversed the atmosphere quite 
independently of the ordinary cyclonic movements that were in progress during the same 
period. 
4. The President exhibited a skin of a rat from Poverty Bay, which the Natives 
asserted was the true Maori rat, and raised a discussion as to there being a rat indigenous 
to these islands. 
Dr. Buller believed the so-called Maori rat, which lived in trees, was really identical 
with the common Mus rattus of Europe. 
Dr. Hector said that he concurred in this opinion ; but Captain Hutton had inferred 
the former existence of another species from bones found in a subfossil state, and which 
was a flesh-eating rat, and therefore not Mus rattus, which species is very common in the 
bush country, and comes into Wellington during hard winters. In the northern forests they 
become very fat at certain seasons, when they feed on the bark of the Patete. They also 
feed largely on wild honey, and after Christmas are often found dead and stupefied in 
large numbers at the foot of the Puriri trees, being poisoned by the honey, which in some 
years is dangerous and even fatal to human life at that season. 
Mr. McKay said rat bones were found mixed up with moa bones in situations which 
suggested that the rat and the moa were contemporaries, and exhibited specimens to illus- 
trate this. Either the moa was not so ancient an inhabitant of these islands, or the rat 
must have been here anterior to the Maori immigration. If the Mus rattus of Europe 
existed here with the moa, by what agency was the rat introduced into these remote 
islands? It was suggested that the rat might have been introduced by the earliest navi- 
gators—perhaps by Tasman—and that the earliest rats and the latest moas existed 
ther. 
