THE MAORIS — BATS — PERCHING-BIRDS 287 



The original native inhabitants of New Zealand, known as 



Tlis IVIeLoris 



Maoris, form a tribe of the Polynesian stock, referred to in the next 

 chapter, but their physical peculiarities are so marked that they form a well- 

 defined branch. Their distinctive characteristics have been regarded as due to a 

 mixture of Polynesians and Melanesians, the result of this fusion being supposed to 

 have resulted in a Caucasian type. But if Polynesians are rightly regarded as 

 Caucasians, these features require no explanation. According to their own tradi- 

 tions, the Maoris reached New Zealand from an island called Hawaiki, but they 

 really came from Rarotonga, and it seems that the immigration took place not 

 more than four centuries ago. It has been suggested that such traces of Melanesian 

 blood as the Maoris appear to retain may be due to mixture with a small popula- 

 tion of Melanesians inhabiting New Zealand before the arrival of the strangers, 

 but whether there was really a Melanesian population in those islands before the 

 Maori immigration is still an undecided question. 



Two marked peculiarities, the one positive and the other negative, 



are highly characteristic of the vertebrate fauna of New Zealand, 

 namely, the abundance of species of flightless birds — some of the extinct members 

 of which were of gigantic stature — pertaining to several perfectly distinct groups, 

 and the absence of all mammals with the exception of two peculiar species of bats 

 and the so-called Maori rat, which has almost certainly been introduced by the 

 race from which it takes its name. The abundance of flightless birds is due, no 

 doubt, at least to a certain extent, to the absence of carnivorous mammals, which 

 has rendered flight altogether unnecessary. Of the two bats, there is much reason 

 to fear that the first and most remai'kable must be added to the steadily length- 

 ening list of species exterminated by man, or, at all events, that it is a candidate 

 for a place in that list at no distant date. The species in question is the New 

 Zealand short-tailed bat (MystacojJS tuber culatus), which has special claims to 

 interest on account of being the sole representative of its genus. According to 

 local naturalists, it is many years since the capture of a specimen of this bat has 

 been recorded; the last instance known being apparently in 1871, when several 

 examples were taken in Milford Sound as the sails of H.M.S. Clio were unfurled 

 to dry. There is one skin in the Canterbury Museum from Westland, a second 

 specimen is recorded from Wellington, and a third from Orepuki, although it is 

 not stated when either of these was taken. That the species survived till much 

 later than 1871 is indicated, however, by a skin received at the British Museum 

 from one of the outlying New Zealand islands about 1890. Whether this bat still 

 lingers in any of these islands remains to be proved, but, at any rate, it is exceed- 

 ingly rare. The nearest relative of this bat appears to be a Malagasy species 

 referred to in the chapter on the fauna of Madagascar. The second species of bat, 

 Chctlinolobus morio, is common to New Zealand and north-eastern Australia, and 

 belongs to a genus ranging over Australasia and Africa. 



In the perching or passerine order of birds the chough-like huia- 

 Perching-Birds. . . 



bird (Heteralocha gouldi), the sole member of its genus, is notable 



on account of the extraordinary difference in the shape of the beak in the two 



sexes, a peculiarity unparalleled among other birds. Whereas in the cock the beak 



is of moderate length and strength, and starling- like, in the hen it is greatly elongated, 



