THE AGE OP NEW ZEALAND. 
425 
one region and depressing another, and these must be re- 
garded as the chief agents which have effected all the later 
changes of our planet ; but those convulsions, however great 
and fearful, appear to have been of limited range, and none 
of them universal in their effects. 
Several of the grand deposits of the northern hemisphere 
seem to be totally wanting in the southern. In New Zealand 
it is doubtful whether the lias age has been passed ; the 
secondary sandstone of Australia seems to be only now 
in a state of deposition there. When the grand mass of 
the southern half of the globe was submerged, the lands 
which survived that great cataclysm and remained above the 
sea level, seem to have escaped many of those later convul- 
sions which have since occurred in other parts of the world, 
and may therefore be expected to present the peculiarities of 
the age preceding that destruction, and still preserve the 
characteristic features of its fauna and sylva. 
The lias may be termed the bird age ; during that period 
birds seem to have been the chief occupants of the earth, and 
to have attained their greatest development j the foot-marks 
of those found impressed on the sandstone of Connecticut 
were eighteen inches long, with a clearly-marked stride of 
six feet, indicating a bird thrice as large as the ostrich. 
Remains of the bird age are still to be seen throughout 
the southern hemisphere, every part of which has its living 
representative of the struthious family or some other ancient 
type of bird, and it is only in very recent times that several 
of the more remarkable forms have disappeared. South 
America has the rhea or nandus ; South Africa the ostrich, 
which has there its chief habitat, and is conspicuous both for 
its size and number ; Australia has the emu, and the East 
Indian Isles the cassowary ; New Guinea the rnuruk ; whilst 
the Mauritius had its dodo, and Madagascar its JEpyornis 
maximus , whose egg is said to have equalled half-a-dozen of 
the ostrich's, being fifteen inches long by nine in width ; even 
the little isles of Bourbon and Rodriquez had the solitaire, 
which probably, with the dodo, was a gigantic species of 
pigeon. Many of the South Sea Isles, so limited in their 
