22 Transactions, —Miscellaneous. 
from the nearest portion of the ancient land, as Madagascar remained, no 
doubt, also for long ages, the happy home of the ZEpyornis after Lemuria 
went down. 
But if ignoring these considerations which seem to make the history of 
New Zealand certain, as that of the other large insular countries mentioned, 
and all the many old islands of the sea, to whose venerable story Mr. Wallace 
says, fearlessly, their inhabitants give us the key; if disregarding the 
absence of all evidence of its ever having been covered with an ice-cap, and 
that there is no possible reason for alleging it to be a logical conclusion 
that it must have been so covered, the glacial enthusiasts will risk their 
- belief in all things else, so long as they can picture to their minds this 
island in the sea of ice, where all was war and carnage; if, instead of the 
moas being the long descended representatives of a royal race of birds, 
come from one of the most ancient aboriginal families upon earth, they 
deem them mere creatures of yesterday, modern adventurers, it is clear that 
they must be prepared to admit that their advancement must have been 
most improperly rapid. 
Their lacertilian forefathers, and theirs before them, must have been 
addicted to saltatory practices more daring than those of our proved American 
cousin, that strange Mexican batrachian the irrepressible axolotl; and 
have set at defiance the old established laws of slow progressive develop- 
ment followed in all other-epochs, as laid down emphatically in the Theory 
of Descent, endangering the foundations of that edifice, so far as im- 
measurable time is requisite for the safety of its construction. 
Their advance in life must have been far more precipitate than that 
made by the inhabitants of the Gallapagos, where the frogs or allied 
batrachian patriarchs have no nobler descendants than the lizard and 
the tortoise, and yet these families can probably trace their descent from 
ancestors of fair standing in the world, when they first landed on the 
scarce cooled lavas. Gay sea-going lacertians, and slumbering chelonians: 
on some floating log may have reached their shores, and from their eggs 
eame the few four-footed creatures domiciled in these islands, amongst 
them the little altered descendant of one of them, nearly the last of its 
race, the only marine lizard now known. The ocean depths may how- 
ever be tenanted still by forms of life we little imagine. Or, notwithstand- 
ing the antipathy the batrachian race evince to being cooped up in isolated 
regions, the Gallapagos population may have a more ancient local pedigree, 
and be descended from the survivors of a shower of ‘young frogs. The 
distance is not too great to suppose the possibility of their having been 
caught up in some strong revolving storm from an American pool and 
carried thus far; it is not long since a number of these ercatures were 
