240 Proceedings of the Royal Society 
tlieir knowledge of comparative anatomy that these huge remains 
appertained to birds. If the theory of the extinction of the 
dinornis before the arrival of the Maories be accepted, a very 
great age must be granted to these singularly well-preserved bones ; 
for, from some of the traditions of those people, we are led to the 
conclusion that the date of their forefathers’ landing in this 
country is much more remote than generally supposed. 
It may be that, as well as possessing a knowledge of comparative 
anatomy, the Maorie fathers were also acute geologists ; but it is 
much more probable that the poetical story of the quarrel of the 
three brother gods of the volcanos of Kua-pehu, Tonjoriro, and 
Taranaki, and the flight of the latter down to the plain which 
now bears his name, tearing up, as he fled, the deep gorge of the 
Whanjarioa river, the taking of the remarkable truncated cone 
of Ranjitolo* from the lake on the north shore of Auckland 
harbour, and other similar stories, have reference to memories of 
those great disturbances, when the almost matchless cone of Mount- 
Egmont was thrown up on the Taranaki shore, and the geyser 
circled lake of Taupo was formed, where the third great crater of 
the group formerly stood upon u that huge flat cone,” — the sterile 
pumice-stone plateau of Taupo, — events which took place at a 
period when the stepping-stones from New Zealand to the old 
home of the Maorie were probably not so far apart as they are to- 
day, as far back, it may be, as the time when the skeletons of men 
of this most ancient type, now from time to time exhumed from 
their graves deep in the solid limestone rock, covered with the 
ashes and scoriae of long quiescent craters, lay bleaching upon the 
coral strand of Oahu. 
* This volcano has evidently been quiet for a long period, but its name, 
“bloody heavens,” denotes that it has not always been so, since, the Maories 
first sailed up Hauraki Gulf. 
