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also the occurrence of bones of the Dinornis in the moraines of 
the glaciers of South Island, and observes that the present Alpine 
flora furnished a large quantity of nutritious food quite capable of 
sustaining the life even of so large a creature; and as the fruits of 
these plants seem at present to serve no evident purpose in the 
economy of nature , he argued the former existence of an adequate 
amount of animal life, to prevent an excessive development of vege- 
tation. This part was played by the Dinornis. 
Those huge birds were then the only large animal beings 
that populated New Zealand; for of indigenous mammalia, except 
a little rat, there is nothing known. The first immigrants, 1 who 
throughout the whole length and breadth of the extensive forests 
found nothing for man to subsist on, except the native rat and 
some small birds, obtained from the giant-birds the necessary sup- 
plies of meat, enabling them to increase in course of time to a 
whole nation numbering hundreds of thousands. But for those 
colossal birds, it would be indeed utterly impossible to comprehend, 
how 200,000 or 300,000 human beings could have lived in New 
Zealand, a country which even in its vegetable world offered noth- 
ing for subsistence, except fern-roots. 
That such was really the case is sufficiently proven in the 
traditions of the natives. Ngalme, one of the discoverers of New 
Zealand, — so tradition says, — describes the land as the haunt 
of colossal birds. There are yet some Maori poems extant, in 
which the father gives his son instructions how to behave in the 
contests with the Moas, how to hunt and kill them. 2 The feasts 
1 According to what is said in Chap. X., there are no other points to go by 
for fixing the time of the first immigration to New Zealand. Nor are we better 
informed as to whether another tribe had inhabited the islands previous to the 
Maoris. In 1862, on the Pararua road near Wellington, peculiar utensils w r ere found, 
under the roots of a Tolara trunk wholly different from those commonly used by 
the Maoris of to-day: especially round sinkers for fishing-lines, of crystalline lime 
with a hole in the middle; also cutting-tools of a peculiar quartz-stone, which is onty 
found in the Wairau, on South Island. These facts have been of late adduced as 
proofs for the existence of a tribe, that inhabited South Island previous to the 
Maoris, and thence had come over to Wellington Harbour. 
2 The birds being unable to swim, were driven towards a river or a lake, or towards 
