CocksunN-Hoop.— New Zealand a Post-glacial Centre of Creation. 5 
the mountain gorges sufficiently to cause them to drop their winter-gained 
loads; “ Piscium et summo genus hesit ulmo," may in the glens under 
Mount Kosciusko be translated, the oxen remained in the lofty gum-trees. 
Very frequently when the accumulations of snow after severe winters 
disappear under the summer sun, cattle are found fixed in the branches of 
the tall trees in the narrow, deep ravines, filled up with drifted snows, in 
which they sank— which may readily be imagined, seeing that these drifts 
are sometimes 300 yards deep—in the upper gorges of the Indi river, 
as stated in the account given by my venerable friend the Rev. W. B. 
Clarke, F.R.S., who, with so much care and arduous labour, explored these 
wild and diffieult regions. There are no evidences whatever, nevertheless, 
of their having gone through a colder period than the present. The view 
may be taken that this, one of the oldest of existing lands— part of it is as 
ancient as old New Zealand, of which but little remains—was an inde- 
pendent **centre of creation" in which the progress of development has 
not in its prevailing forms of life advanced beyond that point reached 
elsewhere in early geological eras. In this island continent “ we find 
ourselves at home ” with our earliest ancestors, ‘the beaked animals," the 
Ornithorhynchus and the Echidna; here are to be seen, hopping about, our 
somewhat nearer ones the rat-like marsupials, similar to those of the early 
tertiary epoch, our certain progenitors of the seventeenth stage or genera- 
tion. We have always known that man was made of the dust of the earth, 
but through what forms that dust had previously passed, we had not been 
precisely informed until now. It may be satisfactory to many to have their 
proved pedigree put before them by Professor Haéckel, at all events many 
noble families will feel assured that it is at least as correct and authentic as 
that of their modern ancestors placed before their fellows in the pages 
of some genealogical dictionaries. 
As well as on the land, individuals of very antique aspect yet linger 
also near its shores and in its rivers: the Trigonia and Cestracion of meso- 
zoic days, and that strange creature of most ancient lineage the Devonian- 
looking Ceratodus. It may be urged that these are but examples of the 
persistent recurrence of peculiar forms under the obligation of the law 
which governs the process of evolution ; or it may be held that they present 
instances of the tendency to revert under the potency of the same law, 
circumstances being suitable, to original types even after the lapse of untold 
ages. Six-legged cats, dogs and other creatures with such abnormal 
characteristics, are alleged even by some to be merely extreme cases of 
atavism—i.e., to show clearly the derivation of the mammalia from, or at 
least their common genetic origin with the Myriapoda, and their alliance to 
the ivy and other clasping plants. 
