ON THE EXTINCT ANIMALS OF THE COLONIES OF GREAT BRITAIN. 265 
species, or belonging to one which [has become extinct, and 
would have been otherwise unknown. Now and then, though 
rarely, the bone of a rat, of the Maori dog, and of a seal could 
be picked out. 
New Zealand never had an indigenous Mammalian fauna 
comparable to the rich Marsupial one of Australia. A bat or 
two flits in its atmosphere, seals haunt its coasts, and thereupon 
is occasionally stranded the carcase of a whale. 
When the Maori first landed he found no kangaroo or other 
herbivorous beast to yield him flesh. The sole source of that 
food, the more needed from the absence of the bread-fruit and 
cocoa-nut trees which he had left at Hawaii, and the colder 
climate of the land to which he had been driven, was in the 
various kinds of huge birds incapable of flight. These, it is 
evident, had overspread both islands. The rich development of 
ferns, with nutritious elements in unusual proportion in the 
roots, of which the Maoris still avail themselves for their 
favourite bread, formed a perennial table for the support of 
the feathered bipeds, to which divers other kinds of vegetable 
nourishment were doubtless added.* Foot-prints on the sea- 
shore suggest their varying their diet by picking up marine 
animals. For how many centuries before the unfeathered 
biped appeared the Dinornithida3 had roamed supreme over the 
islands there are no adequate grounds for estimate. 
There are evidences of different kinds that the extirpation of 
the extinct birds of New Zealand was the work of man.f The 
question of the origin of these wingless species is a deeper one. 
Into that I have entered, as far as there seemed to be any data 
for guidance, at the conclusion of the work on the subject of 
the present section of the communication now offered to the 
Institute. J 
Australia. 
I finally proceed briefly to state the chief results of palaeon- 
tological research in the Colonies of Australia, restricting the 
present notice to the extinct species of the Mammalian class. 
The labours of zoologists in the discovery and determination of 
the existing kinds have made generally known the fact of the 
prevalence in the Australian continent of the peculiar group 
called Marsupialia, or pouched beasts ; those, viz., which pro- 
duce their young prematurely as compared with the rest of the 
class, and transfer them to a ‘skin-bag covering the teats, to 
which the embryo remains attached till it gains the size and 
* See the section “ On the Food, Nests, and Traditions of the Moas,” 
Op. cit. vol. i. p. 450. 
t lb. 
f Op. cit. vol. i. p. 4G0. 
