ESSAY 
ON THE 
ORNITHOLOGY OF NEW ZEALAND. 
By WALTER BULLER, F.LS. 
[Written for the New Zealand Exhibition, 1865.] 
SCIENTIFIC researches in all parts of the world have tended to confirm and 
establish the fact that, in every department of natural history, different 
parts of the earth’s surface are endowed with peculiar types of organization,— 
that different regions are tenanted by totally distinct tribes of animals and 
plants, while their subordinate divisions are characterized by many exclusive 
genera and by numerous forms of species. 
The primary causes which have led to this geographic dispersion of 
species, and the laws which at present control and regulate it, are and 
ever must be subjects of vague speculation; but it is a remarkable and’ 
suggestive fact, that the five great natural divisions of our globe are not 
only inhabited by different varieties of mankind, but differ so widely from 
each other in the character of their animal productions, that they may be 
regarded as so many separate zoological regions or provinces, each embracing 
many distinct faunas, but nevertheless characterized by strong distinguishing 
features. 
Birds, from their very nature, might be supposed to be in some measure 
exempt from the operation of this geographic law. When we consider that 
they are extremely volatile beings, eminently endowed with the power of 
locomotion, and migratory in their nature—that the swallow speeds through 
the air at the rate of sixty miles an hour, and that many of the smaller birds 
perform every season a distance of several thousand miles—we might fairly 
conclude that birds, of all animals, are unconfined in their range, and will be 
found to spread into every region calculated to afford them congenial food 
and climate. 
This, however, is far from being the order of nature. “The arrowy 
course of the swallow, the wanderings of the albatros, or the soaring of 
