discovered in New Zealand . 
99 
achievement, but one, also, from its importance, not 
likely ever to be forgotten; seeing, too, that many things 
of comparatively minor importance are by them handed 
down from father to son in continued succession, from 
the very night of history* Even fishes, birds, and 
plants (anciently sought after with avidity as articles of 
food, and now, if not altogether, very nearly extinct), 
although never having been seen by either the passing or 
the rising generation of Aborigines, are, notwithstanding, 
both in habit and uses well known to them from the de¬ 
scriptive accounts repeatedly rehearsed in their hearing 
by the old men of the villages, descendants of ancient 
days. This very silence, however, I embrace as a 
valuable auxiliary evidence, bearing me out not a little in 
my conjecture that the bones of the Moa will probably 
be found lying either in the upper stratum of the secondary 
or the lower strata of the tertiary formation. In fact, 
unless we suppose this immense bird to have existed at a 
period prior to the peopling of these islands by their 
present aboriginal inhabitants, how are we to account for 
its becoming extinct, and, like the Dodo , blotted out of 
the list of the feathered race? From the bones of about 
thirty birds found at Turanga, in a very short time and 
with very little labour, we can but infer that it once lived 
in some considerable numbers ; and, from the size of those 
bones, we conclude the animal to have been powerful as 
well as numerous. "What enemies, then, had it to contend 
with in these islands—where, from its colossal size, it must 
have been paramount lord of the creation that it should 
have ceased to be ? Man, the only antagonist at all able 
to cope with it, we have already shown as being entirely 
tlie Weka, (a large and unknown bird with short wings, probably 
allied to the genus Ardea), the Klore maori , and other terrestrial 
animals, to the voracity and numbers of those foreign pests* 
H 2 
