Booth. — Description of the Moa Swamp at Hamilton. 129 



with shilling pieces all the egg-shells that he could find, and notwithstanding 

 this close scrutiny, not the slightest piece of an egg-shell did we find. 



Further, all animals have a remarkable instinct for avoiding such places of 

 danger; in fact, very often I have seen man, with his boasted knowledge, rush 

 into places where he could only extricate himself with the greatest difiiculty, 

 when the animal that he was in pursuit of would go round. 



Again, if these bog holes served as Moa traps they are traps that have 

 been in existence as long as the Moa, and it does not seem possible to me for 

 the Moa to have got a standing on the earth and increased when the earth 

 was full of traps to destroy them. 



Many people think that the Maoris burnt the country for the purpose of 

 destroying the Moa, which, they say, carried off the children and ate them. 

 With this opinion I do not agree, for the following reasons: — 



First, if we can judge from the anatomy of the bird, from the shape of its 

 beak, the form of its claws, and its general structure, we can come to no other 

 conclusion than that it was not a bird of prey or flesh-eater. It could not with 

 its straight bill tear a carcass into pieces. 



Again, to make a wanton destruction of food, is not known to have been 

 the custom of savages anywhere in the world. 



In the great American buffalo country, which I have travelled through, the 

 savages have a law which they strictly enforce, and with some tribes under 

 severe penalties, that any savage who wounds a buffalo, though he may be 

 amongst thousands, must not shoot an arrow in, or attempt in any way to kill 

 another, untU he has captured the one he wounded. 



In the valley of the Sacramento they were never known to take more 

 salmon than they wanted for present use, except when they were laying in 

 their winter's stock. 



When the old Eastern States were a wilderness the natives would not kill 

 a young fawn, or disturb a bird whilst incubating, and would not knowingly 

 destroy any animal in a state of gestation. 



Even the low grade of savages in Victoria never kill more opossums than 

 will supply them for a day or two. 



So if the savages of New Zealand made a wholesale slaughter of the Moa 

 by firing the country, burning and rushing them into waterholes by hundreds 

 to die and rot, all I can say is they must have differed from every other type 

 of savage in the known world. 



If we can draw any conclusion from their allowing the few pigs (given to 

 them by Captain Cook) to multiply and spread over the whole island, we could 

 not do them the injustice of even supposing that they would wantonly destroy 

 their chief source of subsistence by burning the country, driving their noble 



