MANTELL.—On Moa Beds. 95 
deposit it will be remembered that some of the most perfect and interesting of 
the early discovered Moa bones were obtained—the collection of Mr. Earle, 
the pair of feet found by Tommy Chaseland, some crania which I think were 
given to Sir George Grey, and many other specimens of great interest were 
obtained from this bed. 
After noting several other places in which I formerly found these remains, 
under conditions which satisfied me that if contemporary with man these 
particular birds had not met their death through his agency, I shall pass to 
those probably more recent deposits which, from the circumstances under 
which they occur, were to my mind clearly accumulations of the refuse of 
human meals. 
Of these, the first which met my observation was the very interesting sand- 
flat of Te Rangatapu, near the mouth of the Waingongoro, a locality for Moa 
bones first discovered, I believe, by a member of our Society, the Rev. 
Richard Taylor, to whom I feel that some apology is due for the grievous 
poaching which I committed upon his manor. 
This sandfiat occupies a break in the coast-line cliffs through which it is 
evident that the river, at no geologically remote period, found its way to the 
sea ; but the sand with which the gap is filled has no connection with the 
bed of finely laminated sand which is described as occurring in the neighbour- 
ing cliffs. It was in excavating in the old surface of this sandflat that I 
found the umus of the old inhabitants, and sundry articles of -their use, such 
as fish-line weights, a patu paraoa, ete., and quantities of obsidian chips. 
Some of the larger bones too had, it seemed to me, been broken while fresh ; 
the fractured ends offering a glazed surface instead of the rough, porous 
appearance of such as were broken in our attempts to extricate them. At 
this place, too, fragments of the egg-shells were first found: some much 
worn by what was mistaken by English geologists for the effect of water- 
carriage, but which was really attributable to the action of drift-sand. The 
result of my exploration of this flat—coupled with the tradition of the 
resident natives that it had been the first settled dwelling-place of their 
ancestors on their arrival from Hawaiki, and the Maori traditions concerning 
the existence of the Moa and the use of it by them as food, of its bones for 
implements, and of its feathers as ornaments—was a tolerably clear conviction 
to my mind that the birds, whose relics I found there, had been killed, cooked, 
and eaten by those ancestors. This conviction I strove to impress upon my 
home correspondents, but not with complete success, for they, supported by 
the opinion of a gentleman of higher scientific and official position in the 
colony, could not divest their minds of the idea that, occurring as these did 
in the surface of the material which filled an old river channel, they must 
have been water-borne from some inland locality. 
