ete oe DT 
SUP ot NEE NNT A i 
Cocrevrs-Hoon.—New Zealand a Post-glacial Centre of Creation. 21 
primordial form, whenever required—granting the possibility of the coming 
into existence of a body containing an inner principle of life, some 
mysterious force—that Mr. Bastian's experiments but prove that every 
atom of what chemists deem dead matter, is pregnant with the power of 
self-development, merely held in a state of utmost tension, from which it 
is ready to spring forward into life, when chance is given—discharging from 
their minds any such “emotional sensation" as the process being in 
obedience to a creative power—the believers in this place of refuge amidst 
the ice have to solve the problem how it came to pass that the progeny of 
the primordial form went through all the stages, which required thousands 
of millions of years, according to his own teaching, to accomplish before, 
so successfully in the new centre of creation, New Zealand. 
How the gigantie birds were quickly elaborated from their reptilian 
progenitors, and these from theirs during the brief space of the post-glacial 
age. If time is necessary for any important process of evolution, it must 
have been for this supposed wonderful transformation of the cold-blooded, 
solid-boned, scale-covered lizard, into the hot-blooded, hollow-boned, 
feathered birds, and the latter have certainly flourished in high perfection 
in New Zealand it will be admitted from most remote times. 
We know from the history of Australia, during late geological ages, 
that the ancestors of the moas could not have migrated from thence. The 
connection between New Zealand and the north-east of New Holland, New 
Guinea, Celebes, the Aru Islands, and other small marsupial strongholds, 
portions once of the ancient bird-inhabited Pacific Continent, was severed 
in a far distant era, when the marsupial line of life had not perhaps 
advanced beyond the assumed stage of its batrachian infancy. 
In that old land of Oceaniea, or Apteryxia we may designate it, the 
lizard race had already far risen in the scale of being, and if the pedigree 
be true, some tribes of their feathered descendants had colonized its north- 
eastern regions, where their representatives remain to this day; one family 
especially having held its ground well. The emu was not to disappear 
before the new marsupials any more than its analogue in South America, 
which probably tells us of a more ancient story still in the history of land and 
sea; the eassowary also has remained in tropical Australia, although the 
nearer ally of the Dinornis, its rival in size, whose remains have been dis- 
covered by the Rev. Mr. Clarke, F.R.S., had not been able to continue its race 
On the mountain tops of the submerged continent, representatives of its 
most ancient denizens also survive. New Britain, New Ireland, and Ceram 
have their cassowaries as well as New Holland and New Guinea, and the 
. great southern peninsula was in complete possession of the grandest speci- 
mens of the ornithie race for long ages after its separation by a wide sea 
