68 Transactions.—Miscellaneous. 
testify, although it is probable that the intervening plains have never sup- 
ported more than a dense thicket of shrubs, or were partly occupied by 
swamps. The greatest number of Moa bones were found where rivers 
debouch on the plains ; and that at a comparatively late period these plains 
were the hunting-grounds of the aboriginies, can be proved almost incon- 
testably. Under some overhanging rocks in the neighbourhood of the 
Clutha River, at a place nambd by the first explorers ‘‘ Moa Flat,” from the 
abundance of bones which lay strewn on the surface, rude stone flakes of a 
kind of stone not occurring in that district, were found by me in 1862, 
associated with Moa bones. Forty miles further in the interior, and at the 
same place where the Moa’s neck was recently obtained, Captain Fraser, 
in 1864, discovered what he described to me as a manufactory for such 
flakes and knives of chert as could be used as rough cutting instruments in 
a cave formed by overhanging rocks, sheltered only from the South-west 
storms, as if an accumulation by a storm-stayed party of natives. With 
these were also associated Moa bones and other remains. Again, at the 
top of the Carrick Mountains, which are in the same district, but to an 
altitude of 5,000 feet above the sea, the same gentleman discovered a gully, 
in which were numerous heaps of bones, and along with them native imple- 
ments of stone, amongst which was a well-finished cleaver of blue slate 
(Pl. VIL., fig. 5), and also a coarsely made hornstone cleaver, the latter of a 
material that must have been brought from a very great distance.”’ 
“ Still clearer evidence that,in very recent times, the natives travelled 
through the interior, probably following the Moa as a means of subsistence, 
like natives in countries where large game abounds, was obtained in 
1865-6 by Messrs. J. and W. Murison. At the Maniototo Plains, bones of 
several species of Dinornis, Aptornis, Apteryx, large Rails, Stringops, and 
other birds are exceedingly abundant in the allurium of a particular stream, 
so much so that they are turned up by the plough with facility. Attention 
was arrested by the occurrence, on thehigh ground terrace which bounds 
the valley of this stream, of circular heaps composed of flakes and chips of 
chert, of a description that occurs only in large blocks along the base of the 
mountains at a mile distant. This chert is a very peculiar rock, being a 
‘Cemented Water Quartz’ or sandy gravel converted into quartzite, by 
infiltration of silicious matter. The resemblance of the flakes to those they 
had seen described as found in the ancient kitchen middens; and a desire to 
account for the great profusion of Moa bones on a lower terrace shelf 
nearer the margin of the stream, led the Messrs. Murison to explore the 
ground carefully, and, by excavating in likely spots, they found a series of 
circular pits partly lined with stones, and containing 
g, intermixed with 
charcoal, abundance of Moa bones and egg-shells, together with bones of 
