Wellington Philosophical Society. 553 



Mr. Kirk thought the tree was identical with Pisonia umbellifera, and that the sticky 

 exudation did act like birdlime in getting those large seeds carried on the feathers of 

 birds. 



3. Dr. Hector made some interesting remarks on earthquake disturbances in the 

 ocean, referring to what he had said at the previous meeting, that the tidal disturbances 

 felt on these shores about the time of the Sunda eruptions were due to their influence. 

 The editor of the " New Zealand Journal of Science " had objected that, as the great 

 Australian continent intervened directly between the Straits of Sunda and New Zealand, 

 no tidal wave from that cause could have been felt here without being felt much more 

 forcibly along the southern and western shores of Australia and Tasmania, and suggested 

 that the disturbances felt here were probably due to other submarine movements in the 

 Pacific. Late reports showed that the tidal disturbance was very marked on the west 

 coast of Tasmania ; and the disturbances felt here were found to coincide suggestively with 

 the succession of earthquake shocks that f ollowed the eruptions at Sunda. The retardation 

 or acceleration of the tidal swell by those earthquake shocks would act and react in various 

 directions, thereby causing disturbances of varying intensity on all the shores of these 

 islands. An extraordinary phenomenon to which he particularly drew attention was, that 

 atmospheric disturbances as self -registered by a delicately-adjusted barograph coincided 

 remarkably in the sudden jerks on several days with the recorded eruptions at Sunda, 

 beginning ou the evening of the 27th August, and recurring on four or five days. These 

 barometrical jerks and curves were exhibited by a diagram, with dates and hours given ; 

 and Dr. Hector moreover pointed out that these readings in Wellington corresponded with 

 similar jerks in the curves recorded by a self-registering barometer at Dunedin, showing 

 that they were produced by a fast-moving influence that traversed the atmosphere quite 

 independently of the ordinary cyclonic movements that were in progress during the same 

 period. 



4. The President exhibited a skin of a rat from Poverty Bay, which the Natives 

 asserted was the true Maori rat, and raised a discussion as to there being a rat indigenous 

 to these islands. 



Dr. Buller believed the so-called Maori rat, which lived in trees, was really identical 

 with the common Mus rattus of Europe. 



Dr. Hector said that he concurred in this opinion ; but Captain Hutton had inferred 

 the former existence of another species from bones found in a subfossil state, and which 

 was a flesh-eating rat, and therefore not Mus rattus, which species is very common in the 

 bush country, and comes into Wellington during hard winters. In the northern forests they 

 become very fat at certain seasons, when they feed on the bark of the Patete. They also 

 feed largely on wild hooey, and after Christmas are often found dead and stupefied in 

 large numbers at the foot of the Puriri trees, being poisoned by the honey, which in some 

 years is dangerous and even fatal to human life at that season . 



Mr. McKay said rat boaes were found mixed up with moa bones in situations which 

 suggested that the rat and the moa were contemporaries, and exhibited specimens to illus- 

 trate this. Either the moa was not so ancient an inhabitant of these islands, or the rat 

 must have been here anterior to the Maori immigration. If the Mus rattus of Europe 

 existed here with the moa, by what agency was the rat introduced into these remote 

 islands ? It was suggested that the rat might have been introduced by the earliest navi- 

 gators — perhaps by Tasman — and that the earliest rats and the latest moas existed 

 together. 



