﻿120 Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



that appeared in the "Zoologist" for 1864. The fresh discovery, therefore, of 

 well-preserved remains of the Moa only tends to confirm and establisli this 

 view, and it would have been unnecessary to enlarge on the subject by the 

 publication of the foregoing notes, which were long since written, but for the 

 dissimilar conclusions arrived at by Dr. Haast, in a recent address to the Can- 

 terbury Institute, which, from the large amount of interesting and novel matter 

 it contains, will doubtless have a wide circu.lation. (See p. 66 ef seq.) 



Art. YII. — Notes on Moa Remains. By W. D. Murison. 



[Read before the Qtago Institute, IQth SejJteniber, 1871.] 



Dr. Hector, in his paper, refers to certain information which he obtained 

 from me in 1866, relative to the discovery of moa remains in old cooking 

 places on the Maniototo plains. I shall take the opportunity therefore of 

 adding a few notes upon this interesting subject, in the hope that my observa- 

 tions will assist in solving some questions concerning the Moa, which have 

 formed matter of controversy, and which still remain unsettled. Nearly every 

 writer on New Zealand has had something to say about the wingless birds 

 which formerly inhabited the country, but remarks concerning tliem have 

 been confined chiefly to desciiptions of the bones, to the conditions under 

 which they have been found, and to inquiries about the Moa amongst the 

 Maori tribes in the North. It was not until about six months ago, when Dr. 

 Haast delivered his inaugural address to the Philosophical Institute of 

 Canterbury, that any attempt, so far as 1 am aware, has been made to deter- 

 mine the approximate date of the disappearance of the Moa, or to show that 

 the bird was known only to a race of people which is now extinct. (See Art. 

 IV., p. QQ.) Dr. Haast has met with great success in his search after moa 

 remains, and mainly through his exertions the Chiistchurch Museum has 

 acquired probably the finest collection of moa bones and skeletons that can be 

 seen anywhere. In his able and exhaustive address he nari'ates fully the 

 results of his investigations, and he indicates the conclusions which they have 

 led him to arrive at. He contends that the large birds of New Zealand were 

 the representatives of the gigantic quadrupeds of the northern hemisphere in 

 the post-pliocene period ; that New Zealand at the time of the arrival of the 

 Europeans was in the neolithic period, or that of polished stone implements ; 

 but that there has been a palseolithic period, or age during which stone and 

 flint implements, rudely fashioned, were used ; that the Moa frequented the 

 grassy plains of the interior during the latter jieriod, and was hunted by a 

 people who inhabited these islands before the arrival of the Maoris ; and that 

 hunters and hunted have both passed away. He remarks upon the absence of 



