Travers.— Notes on the Eatinetion of the Moa, 69 
the dog, the egg-shells being in such quantities that they consider that 
hundreds of eggs must have been cooked in each hole. Along with these 
were stone implements of various kinds (reduced to one-third natural size in 
Pl. VII., figs. 1 to 4) and of several other varieties of rock besides the chert 
which lies on the surface. The form and contents of these cooking ovens 
correspond exactly with those described by Mantell, in 1847, as occurring on 
the sea coast ; and among the stone implements which Mautell found in 
them, he remembers some of them to have been of the same chert which 
occurs in situ at this locality, 50 miles in the interior. The greater 
number of these chert specimens found on the coast are, with the rest of 
the collection, in the British Museum. There is another circumstance 
which incidently supports the view that while the Moas still existed in 
great numbers, the country was open and regularly traversed by the natives 
engaged in hunting. Near the old Maori ovens on the coast, Mantell 
discovered a very curious dish made of steatite, a mineral occurring in New 
Zealand on the West Coast, rudely carved on the back in the Maori 
fashion, measuring twelve by eight inches, and very shallow. The natives 
at the time recognised this dish by tradition, and said there were two of 
them. It is very remarkable that, since then, the fellow-dish has been 
discovered by some gold-diggers in the Manuherikia Plain, and was used 
on an hotel counter at the Dunstan Township as a match box, till it was 
sent to England, and, as I am informed, placed in a public Museum in 
Liverpool. 
‘Along with the trimmed chert flakes, the Messrs. Murison found 
polished adzes of aphanite, and even jade, which shews that the hunting 
natives had, in addition to the flake knives, the same implements as those 
which are so common among the natives at the present day, though their 
use Is now superseded by iron. 
‘“‘In the ovens on the coast, besides flakes and rough knives of chert 
and flint, are found flake knives of obsidian, a rock which only occurs in the 
Voleanic District of the North Island, and also adzes and axes of every 
degree of finish and variety of material. Although there is no positive 
evidence, in the latter case, that more highly finished implements were in 
use by a people cotemporaneous with the Moa, whose remains, collected 
by human agency, are so abundant in the same place, nevertheless the 
fact of a similar association occurring far in the interior, affords strong 
presumptive evidence on this point, as the finely finished implements must 
have been carried inland, and to the same spot where the Moa remains 
oceur, to be used at native feasts, of which these bones are the only other 
existing evidences.” 
