454 
ISLAND LIFE. 
[PART II. 
the birds. The lizards belong to three genera, — Hinulia and 
Mocoa, which have a wide range in the Eastern tropics and the 
Pacific and Malayan regions, as well as Australia ; and Naultinus, 
a genus peculiar to Mew Zealand, but belonging to a family — 
Geckotidse, spread over the whole of the warmer parts of the 
world. Australia, on the other hand, has three small but 
peculiar families, and no less than thirty-six peculiar genera of 
lizards, many of which are confined to its temperate regions, 
but no one of them extends to temperate New Zealand. The 
extraordinary lizard-like Hatteria jpundata of New Zealand 
forms of itself a distinct order of reptiles, in some respects 
intermediate between lizards and crocodiles, and having therefore 
no affinity with any living animal. 
The only representative of the Amphibia in New Zealand is 
a solitary frog of a peculiar genus (Liopelma hochstetteri) ; but 
it has no affinity for any of the Australian frogs, which are 
numerous, and belong to eleven different families; while the 
Liopelma belongs to a very distinct family (Bombinatoridse), 
confined to Europe and temperate South America. 
Of the fresh-water fishes we need only say here, that none 
belong to peculiar Australian types, but are related to those of 
temperate South America or of Asia. 
The Invertebrate classes are comparatively little known, and 
their modes of dispersal are so varied and exceptional that the 
facts presented by their distribution can add little weight to 
those already adduced. We will, therefore, now proceed to the 
conclusions which can fairly be drawn from the general facts of 
New Zealand natural history already known to us. 
Deductions from the peculiarities of the New Zealand Fauna . — 
The total absence (or extreme scarcity) of mammals in New 
Zealand obliges us to place its union with North Australia and 
New Guinea at a very remote epoch. We must either go back 
to a time when Australia itself had not yet received the ancestral 
forms of its present marsupials and monotremes, or we must 
suppose that the portion of Australia with which New Zealand 
was connected was then itself isolated from the mainland, and 
was thus without a mammalian population. We shall see in 
our next chapter that there are certain facts in the distribution 
