CockBunN-Hoop.— New Zealand a Post-glacial Centre of Creation. — 98 
landed in excellent health and spirits on the deck of a vessel in the Pacific, 
half that distance from the Australian coast. 
If such a fortunate chance occurred, which, however, is scarce possible, 
and gave a somewhat fairer start to the higher forms of life in New Zealand, 
their offspring have devoured the race of their ancestors, as until very 
recently frogs were unknown there; now introduced from Australia in some 
localities they croak from every pond their appreciation of its swamps, safe 
from destroying snakes. Touching these same frogs, it appears to have 
been a want of judgment in their various descendants, a blunder justifying 
the term of “ the aimless action of natural selection," not to have gone on 
improving and perfecting the attributes possessed by them. None of their 
progeny being able to jump about and avoid obstacles in their path after 
the connection between the brain and limbs has been severed, one would 
imagine that the course of progressive development should have improved, 
instead of arresting the advantageous capacity enjoyed by some of their 
analogues and remote progenitors of producing new limbs, and even 
heads, when accident removes the original ones. 
On the whole most persons will prefer to consider the moas the long 
descended aboriginal inhabitants of this land where they have reigned lords 
amongst wingless birds from the far distant era when it formed a portion of 
a great continent, which on the score of antiquity has equal right to be 
delineated on the map of the old world as Lemuria. 
All that is now land has been sea, and the seas land, not once, but pro- 
bably over, and over, and over again, and as a continuity of the various 
dry portions of the globe has at one time or another existed (excepting, of 
course, new lands like the Gallapagos and other volcano-born isles), the 
ancient connection explains how it came to pass that wingless birds 
descended from the same original created type are found in South America, 
in Africa, and in all these islands of the sea. 
It seems easier to believe in the tertiary men, who night if they 
desired, have gone to war mounted on Anchitheriums (for we may be per- 
mitted to take for granted that there may have been a family of these 
creatures large enough to carry their short-legged, ape-like riders), who 
were there to witness, we are told, the coming upon the stage of the 
elephantine races, and all the many quaint-looking giant creatures, long 
passed away, than to imagine that their descendants could have been pre- 
sent at the birth of the first taniwha-descended, post-glacial moa. 
Certainly the supporters of this idea may suggest that some of the 
tertiary men devoted themselves during the long pliocene ages (which, when 
it suits his argument, are reduced to moderate periods by Professor Haéckel), 
to the breeding of birds without wings, and achieved in the pursuit success 
