GIANT BIRDS. 
239 
A main interest of such a find lies not in the power of supply- 
ing museums with specimens of what is rapidly disappearing from 
the face of the world, but in the possibility of finding species 
of Moa that have not hitherto been tabulated. Whether any 
new species have been brought to light on this occasion the 
experts will not say until there has been time to make a careful 
study of the bones, nor do they venture on any theory to account 
for there being so many individual birds dead in that one place, 
where there appears to be no room for the explanations offered 
in connection with previous great finds. The date of these birds 
appears to be earlier than that of the coming of the Maoris into 
New Zealand, say five or six hundred years ago, as the Maori 
memory appears to have in it no trace of feasting on these giant 
Moas, but celebrates the rat-hunt in its ancient heroic song. And 
your readers may picture their appearance by noticing the fact 
that one of the recently found bones must have belonged to a 
Moa fourteen feet high !” 
Note. — For further information on this interesting subject, the reader is 
referred to a paper in Natural Science, October, 1892, by Mr. F. W. Hutton. 
In a valuable paper, read before the Royal Geographical Society by Mr. H. O. 
Forbes, March 13, 1893, lecturer alluded to the important fact that bone 
belonging to big extinct struthious birds have been discovered in Patagonia. 
This is interesting news as bearing upon the theory of a former Antarctic con- 
tinent connecting Australia and New Zealand with South Africa, and perhaps 
even with South America. After the lecture, to which we listened with great 
interest, the subject was discussed by Mr. Slater, Dr. Gunther, and Dr. 
Henry Woodward. For ourselves we can see no great difficulty in accepting 
the theory that such a continent once existed, though it is out of harmony 
with the now rather fashionable theory of “ the permanence of ocean basins ” 
— -a doctrine which seems to have been pressed too far. 
