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alternately. The male is larger than the female and has a longer 
bill. They can run and hop very fast. The female Apteryx, which 
T kept for several days alive in my room in Nelson, hopped very 
readily over objects two or three feet high. Dogs and cats are, 
next to man , the most dangerous enemies of the bird. The natives, 
by imitating its call , — at night , of course , — know how to call 
it up to them , and to confound it by a sudden glare of torch-light, 
so that they can either catch it with the hand or kill it with a 
stick. Dogs also are used in kiwi-hunting. 
The Kiwi, however, is only the last and rather insignificant 
representative of the family of wingless birds that inhabited New 
Zealand in bygone ages. By the term “Moa” 1 the natives signify a 
family of birds, that we know merely from bones and skeletons, a 
family of real giant-birds compared with the little Apterygides. 
Missionaries were the first that beared from the natives of those 
gigantic birds, against which the ancestors of the present Maoris 
had been engaged in fearful struggles. The natives even pointed 
out a Totara tree on Lake Rotorua as the place, where their an- 
cestors slew the last Moa, and in order to corroborate the truth 
of their narrative they showed large bones , which they found scat- 
tered on the banks of rivers , on the sea-coast , in swamps and lime- 
stone-caves, as the remains of those extinct giant-birds. 
In 1839, Mr. Rule brought to England a fragment of a thigh 
bone of a Moa, from which Professor Richard Owen drew up a 
wonderfully correct idea of the bird. Almost at the same time 
the Rev. Mr. Colenso described in the Tasmanian Journal Moa-bones 
as the remains of gigantic birds. These facts excited interest and 
caused fresh researches, in consequence of which the Missionary, the 
Rev. W. Williams in 1842 sent several chests full of such bones, — 
which had been gathered on North Island in the coast districts about 
Poverty Bay and Hawkes’ Bay, — to Dr. Buckland. Dr. Buckland 
1 Moa or Toa throughout Polynesia, is the word applied to domestic fowls, 
originating perhaps from the Malay word mua, a kind of peasants. The Maoris 
have no special term for the domestic fowl* tikaokao is the cock, and heihei the hen; 
the former probably an (onomatopoeical) imitation of the crowing of the cock; the 
latter a corruption of the English word hen. 
