126 7'ransactloRS. — Miscellaneous. 



madness to suppose that bones of this description would tumble along on the 

 bottom of a gully, amongst stones of various size and weight, and not be 

 broken or ground to powder. It appears to me that even to imagine this 

 deposit to have been made by water would be to imagine an impossibility. 



You might ask me how then did the fine gravel and pebbles come amongst 

 the bones, and why was it so evenly distributed through the greater part of the 

 deposit 1 I answer, by one of tAvo ways : It has either been brought by the 

 water from the bed of gravel underneath, or has been in the bodies of the birds 

 when they fell. I must say that, for the following reasons, it almost amounts 

 to a convictioji with me that the latter was the case. Considering that 

 immediately over the spring, for a depth of 3 feet, the bones were packed in 

 as tight as though they had been trampled in by horses, I fail to see how the 

 pebbles and gravel could have been forced up by the water. Again, this 

 gravel being deposited in small bunches or heaps on the top, where they mostly 

 occurred, and as those bunches were invariably sheltered from top disturbance 

 by a pelvis or breast bone, it appears most reasonable to me to suppose that 

 these deposits came in from the top. Where these bunches were sheltered, or 

 could not be disturbed from the top, they lay as they had dropped, but where 

 unsheltered they became scattered and equally distributed amongst the 

 bones. The disturbing causes I shall explain presently. Again, it is a 

 remarkable fact that in the bogs and peat, where the sluicers came on large 

 bones, this peculiar white gravel always occurred; in no other place in the 

 claim was it to be found mixed with the peat. I have myself cut peat in the 

 same place, and do not recollect having seen a particle of gravel. Further- 

 more, it is generally remarked that about the ranges where the remains of the 

 Moa are found these white pebbles are almost invariably in close ])roximity. 



However, I must leave this phenomenon, as requiring more light for a 

 solution. 



I must confess that when first commencing to open up the pit I could sec 

 no other cause for the deposit of bones than that savages had placed them 

 there. But during further progress of the work I was involuntarily obliged 

 to abandon my favourite theory. 



It is true this hypothesis seems very possible, and even feasible, and many 

 jeasons can be adduced to show that this might have been the case, but 

 when all the arguments are summed up, they stand unsupported by a single 

 fact in connection with the subject under consideration, for not the slightest 

 indication of human agency could be detected during the wliole couree of exhu- 

 mation. If these bones had passed through the liands of savages, the rude stone 

 implements used by tliem in those early periods, for the cutting of flesh and 

 the breaking of bones, would have left some marks. Amongst so many hundred 

 bones some of them would have borne the marks of a sharp edge, a hack, a 



