ond of more or less friable sea-sand, oven. The stones, evidently brought several feet in depth, either an old from some distance, as there were no elevated sea-beach or a drift from a basaltic rocks near, were all fire-marked, more seaward shore. Supporting this and unmistakably those over which stratum is a third, in some places thirty food had, in the usual Polynesian manto forty feet thick, of hard, pink-colored ner, been cooked; all about the spot sand (not sufficiently consolidated, per- were indications that a great feast had haps, to be designated sandstone), and taken place, for the bones of seals, it is in this bed alone that the bones of whales, fishes, ducks, swan, parrots, the extinct birds, now being uncovered pigeons, hawks, and swamp-hens had by the wind, seem to be entombed. contributed to it, as well as more than Our search was rewarded by finding the one aphanapteryx. Though this oven remains not only of the aphanapteryx, had been dug in the pink sand-bed, it is but those also of a tall coot and a large highly improbable that it was an uncovand peculiar raven-like crow (Palæoco- ered interstratification; but rather that rax moriorum) equally unknown to have it had been long ago in an already deexisted in any part of the New Zealand nudated surface of that bed, which had region. On the shore-but not em- been covered and uncovered perhaps bedded, so far as I could ascertain, in many times by sand drifted from the the hard, pink sand, because they have shore. It undoubtedly proves, howprobably died out more recently I ever, that these now vanished birds found bones of several other birds of were contemporary with a people on the mountain parrot (Nestor notabilis), these islands, who employed the Polythe lesser owl (Spiloglaux Novo-Zea- nesian method of cooking, and used, landia), the small hawk (Harpa ferox), as blubber knives, flint flakes (a few of and of the weka or wood-hen (Ocydro- which were found by us in association mus australis), which are now living in with the remains of their feast) idenand characteristic of New Zealand, but tical in form with those the Morioris till long extinct in the Chatham Islands. recently used. They lay in association with remains of Dieffenbach's wood-hen (Cabalus dieffenbachii), a bird so rare that since 1840 only three specimens have been obtained (of which two are in the British Museum and one is lost). This bird, now quite extinct in the larger island of the group, is confined to a rocky islet a little distance off the coast. The genus is unknown even in New Zealand, and occurs nowhere else till Lord Howe's Island, lying to the north-west between that colony and Australia, is reached, where another solitary species lives. Both here and afterwards on the eastern coast I found bones of that singular lizard the Sphenodon punctatum, or tuatara of the Maoris; the unique species of a peculiar order of ancient pedigree, now on the very verge of extinction | and confined to a single small island off the northern coast of New Zealand. As we advanced along the beach a low mound surmounted by a heap of dark stones attracted our steps. It turned out to be the remains of an old Moriori

My further purpose in visiting the Chatham Islands was, as I have said above, to discover, if I might be so fortunate, whether those characteristic birds of New Zealand, the moa (Dinornis), the kiwi (Apteryx), and the woodhen (Ocydromus) had ever lived there. This last I had already been successful in discovering. I knew from various sources that the Morioris had a tradition of a great bird they called the poùwa. Mr. Shand also had, with much kindness and trouble, recounted to me all that they themselves knew, and described to me the exact localities where they say their forefathers trapped and killed those wonderful birds. To these places, therefore, excursions were next undertaken in great hope and expectancy of success.

One of the most striking features of Wharekauri (the largest island of the group, as will be remembered) is the number of tarns and lakes it possesses. The most extensive of these, named Te Whanga, occupies the greater part of

die

year

pouwa," he said, "he a big bird; he 00! two hundred, three hundred (this estimate of time is an acquired European phrase) - "long time ago. I see his bone stick up in Te Whanga, where Morioris camp long time back. Me young fellow father of

water. Oo! big, all same as cow; he eat plenty grass swim [floating on] lagoon water, Moriori call koko." It is, of course, impossible to describe in words Tapu's gestures and expressions; but no one who heard him could doubt that he had seen large bones in the lagoon, and that their origin had been explained to him by his father.

the low central region of the island, was an intelligent old fellow, with a and on its eastern side is separated very Jewish countenance, and highly from the sea only by a very narrow bar developed frontal processes. "The of sand, which every few years, when the lagoon becomes surcharged by the rivers which feed it, is carried away, and the water rushes out till the lagoon attains a certain level, when the sea again silts up the opening. The western side of this lake is bounded by cliffs of limestone of Palæozoic age, on me tell me Moriori make him hole in which lies a bed, in some places fifty to water, drive him pouwa in, hammer sixty feet deep, of friable polyzoa, con-him dead, and roast him. His bone I taining sharks' teeth and echinoderm see him stick in hole in mud in lagoon spines of species belonging to the transition period between the secondary and tertiary epochs (the cretaceo-tertiary of the New Zealand Geological Survey Reports). Along the margin of this lagoon, and at a short distance from the shore, so their traditions run, the Morioris dug deep holes, into which the pouwa was driven, and, when inextricably bogged, it was clubbed to death, and then dragged ashore to the cookingpits. At every one of the indicated places we succeeded in finding old ovens, the sites of camps or the remains of feasts, which were, as usual, birds, molluscs, and fishes. At one spot at least we found grim proofs that the feasters did not always confine themselves to the aforementioned diet, for I gathered several human limbbones, and a couple of grinning crania, with in each an ominously suggestive hole in that region of the skull where an additional eye would have proved of such inestimable value to a race so cruel and treacherous to each other as our own. To my great disappointment, our extended excavations rewarded me with no bone or fragment of a bone of the poiwa or of the apteryx. Yet from the circumstantiality of the account of the pouwa in their traditions, and of the narrative I listened to a little later from Tapu, one of the oldest surviving chief men of the Morioris (whom I found living in a poor house-cluster at the south-east corner of the island), I cannot resist the conviction that the porwa which, if it was anything, must have been a species of moa-did actually live on these islands. Tapu

In the kitchen-midden that produced the human remains there were thousands of swan bones of the same species as that I had gathered by the side of the oven on the Waitangi beach. This lake was, therefore, probably their chief home, whither they must have resorted in enormous numbers, for in some localities they appear to have been almost the sole food of the people. That the swan, now indigenous only to West Australia, South America, and the north of the northern hemisphere, had in past times been also a native of New Zealand was unknown till the previous year, when it was discovered during my excavation of a cave near Christchurch, which, by the landslip of a huge portion of the hill at whose base it was situated, had been closed from time immemorial, and has from this circumstance afforded irrefragable evidence of the contemporaneity of the moa with the Maori, in contradistinction to another race supposed to precede them. The Maori fisher-folk (as the implements found prove them to have been) who occupied the cave (from which, perhaps, they escaped only just in time to save themselves from being entombed) fed on the swan and on the moa, and cast their bones side by side into the refuse-heap

in front of their door to await the the harder ground safe to travel over future. Neither in New Zealand nor from treacherous bogs on both hands, in the Chatham Islands is the swan now over which neither horse nor pedesindigenous, and, if we may judge from trian could safely pass. Horses born ou the fact of its being totally unknown to the island, however, exhibit a wonderthe Maoris, a people who have handed ful sagacity in regard to surfaces which down in their traditions a minute ac- will not carry them, and many of them count of everything that they used as can be trusted to discriminate where it food, and are entirely silent about the is unsafe to tread when the rider is swan, its disappearance from both lands unable to tell. The surface of the must go back to a very distant date. wetter bogs in the many extensive deWithin recent years the Australian pressions of the ground presented wonblack swan (Chenopis atrata) has been derfully rich sheets of color from their introduced into New Zealand, and has carpet of moss, of bright green, yellow, already multiplied with extraordinary and pink, and their endless intermedirapidity, showing that the climate and ate shades, quite making up for the food-supply of its adopted country are absence of flowering plants, of which eminently suited to it. The cause of the sterile moorland produces amid its the total extinction, therefore, of the stunted bracken few species except a ancient swan (and other birds also) in sweet, pure white gentian (Gentiana its natural home appears at present in- sarosa), a lowly violet with scarlet berexplicable. ries, and a purple sundew. Higher up, however, the slopes became more shrub-clad and we passed through fields of kikitere, a tall, shrubby member of the Compositæ, covered with large purple and white aster-like flowers, and through brakes of broad-leaved dracophyllums and brightly berried leucopogons, the austral representatives of our heaths, amid which the splendid arborescent ragwort (Senecio hunti) of the Chatham Islands displayed its golden domes gorgeous even beneath a gloomy sky. As we reached our destined shelter on the Awatapu cliffs a mizzling mist came down with its chilling dampness, and what with the sombre green of the dripping lichen and moss-hung trees standing ghostly around, the solitude and silence of the region, broken now and then only by the harsh screech of a mutton bird, and the deepening dusk, the landscape, which all the way had worn a cold and uninviting countenance, now grew as

Disappointed in our delvings in the middens of the lowlands, there still remained for investigation untouched heaps at the base of the high cliffs of the southern coast, and thither we next directed our steps. The hill districts of the southern regions are uninhabited and quite houseless except for a small shepherd's hut on Mr. Hood's property, at the highest part of the island, and this he very kindly placed at our service. With an extra horse added to our cavalcade carrying provisions for four or five days, we started under a threatening sky, and, travelling southward, climbed slowly up for the greater part of a day through country of a very remarkable character. Without a guide well acquainted with the district it would be impossible for a stranger to travel across it with safety. The whole surface of the island, though not so much on the lower parts, is one vast peat moss many feet in depth. There are no discernible paths, and appar- dismal and repellent as can be conently no obstacles to one's riding anywhere in a straight line; yet in following my guide I found we veered to all points of the compass and were constantly wandering widely from the direction of our destination to escape being bogged. There appeared to my inexperienced eye nothing to indicate

ceived. So that when the time came we were not sorry to stretch ourselves on the floor within our blankets before the "roaring" fire we had taken good care to make, and abandon ourselves to the sleep of the tired and dejected. When we awoke in the morning we unbarred the door to a fresh-born scene

the Awatapu of yesterday had undergone transfiguration. The dull leaden sky had vanished, the last scrolls of mist were dissolving into space, the grey-beard lichens were dotted with glistening beads, the ake-ake trees, whose foliage yesterday stood reversed to the north-west wind in a cold and shivering attitude, were this morning fluttering their silver under-sided leaves to the sou'-wester beneath a bright sun and a blue sky, so that the woods where they were abundant looked starred with flowers. Instead of silence the noisy home sparrows who had already discovered this distant habitation, and had, of course, packed every cranny with their nests, were lustily chirruping; the adjacent shrubberies were full of the exquisite notes of the bell-bird (Authornis melanocephala), the sweetestthroated of all the Antipodean songsters, the booming of pigeons and the warble of the white-cravated tui. As for solitude the fantails (Rhipidura), those most trustful and winning of all the feathered tribes, I care not in what land, came fearlessly circling round our heads, and perching within touch, played hide-and-seek from behind their fan-like tails which they spread and close untiringly, uttering the while their low, cheery chirp; they even followed us along the forest paths, flitting by our side from tree to tree, as if offering their own bright companionship and happy in ours.

not resist the temptation to scramble to view a scene from which nothing that could increase the gratification of the eye or the mind seemed absent — the chief of many pictures of unwonted beauty which from time to time I caught in the island in hurrying from huntingground to hunting-ground, but which, though ever bright and vivid to myself, I can scarcely hope to describe in words which will not appear extravagant and superlative to the calm reader, even if I indicate merely its outlines: The sun in a cloudless sky lighting up a deep sapphire sea, from which rises in massive stateliness a solid wall of foliage of the darkest green, lit here and there by a clump of the golden ragwort or a patch of purple veronica; the blue waves circling round the off-lying rocks in snowy rings and rolling on in "endless tides" to break in rainbow-tinted spray against the black, unverdured line of rocks that belt the shore seven hundred feet below the eye; to southward, across a rippling strait, rise fantastic islets of bare, columnar rocks, and still beyond stand out the rugged crags and flat-topped heights of Mangare and Rangiauria, dimly limned through a mellowing haze against the sky; low down by the water's level sail sooty petrels and black-billed gulls, or redbeaked terns speed past the face on flashing wings; high overhead the magnificent native pigeon, toying with the strong up-draught of the breeze against the cliffs, wheels in the blue. These are the mere elements of the fair scene which the reader must imagine for himself. Scrambling down the riverexcavated gap we eventually reached the shore, and discovered with little trouble the old cooking-places of the Morioris by the great heaps of pawa (Haliotis) shells they had left. Long and arduous was our search, but no pouwa or aphanapteryx, kiwi, or swan bones - and indeed little of importance

The kitchen-middens of our quest were situated on the shore beneath the cliffs some distance along the coast, and were accessible only by a more or less steep descent, where a river had somewhat sloped down the almost sheer basaltic precipices. On these high seawalls, free from marauding sheep and pigs, grows the richest vegetation on the island; they present an unbroken sheet of verdure from their summits down to the verge of the water. From the front of the cliff there projected in one rewarded our exertions. It was eviplace a narrow seaward buttress, a dent that none of these birds had lived splendid coign of vantage clear of the in this region. Grey ducks, which line of the land, to be reached, how- probably then as now crowded the ever, only by wary steps and careful neighboring tarns, fish, molluscs, and grasping of the trees, whither I could echini (or sea-eggs), formed the only

food apparently of the frequenters of the Chatham Islands must have been this rugged, rocky beach. I was once united by continuous land. Such facts more sorely disappointed. It was some as the presence of the same species of compensation, however, to have seen wood-hen in the far-south Macquarrie growing here in its own home that Islands as in New Zealand, and the noble plant, the sole species of a genus occurrence of a species closely related confined to this island, which goes by to Dieffenbach's rail of the Chatham the very inappropriate name of the Islands in Lord Howe's Island (which Chatham Island lily. The sheep are lies between New Zealand and Austravery fond of its leaves and the pigs of lia), with much such like zoological and its roots, so that in all places which botanical evidence, which space will these animals can reach it has disap-not permit me to detaii, go to prove that peared. It loves the roughest boul- New Zealand is but a big fragment of a dered beaches and thrives best when it large vanished continent, which not has to push its head up through feet of only included the Macquarrie, the An rotting seaweed within the wash of the tipodes, and other neighboring Antarctide. It is well named noble, for its tic islands, but, as Mr. Wallace in his straight stem, four to five feet in height, "Island Life" has suggested, stretched after giving off magnificent broad, deep northward by Lord Howe's Island pergreen, rhubarb-like leaves, expands in haps to join with the northern end of many heads of the darkest blue flowers, eastern Australia, in those days a long, so unmistakably recalling the forget-me-narrow continent, of which Tasmania not that it has received the scientific was part, but with much probability not name of Myosotidium nobile. its southernmost termination.

From Awatapu we descended to Readers of that curious old book, Owenga, on the shores of Hanson Bay," The Voyage of François Leguat of in the hope that there I might be able Bresse to Roderiguez, Mauritius, Java, to add to my collections. I obtained, and the Cape of Good Hope" (recently however, only a few bones of the tua- republished by the Hakluyt Society), tara, and of some of the same extinct will remember that during his sad durbirds as I had gathered on the Waitangi ance in the Mascarene Islands in 1691, beach, showing that these species were that "philosophic Huguenot," in reprobably distributed over the whole cording with much circumstance all that of the island. From Owenga I had he suffered and all that he saw, gives hoped to reach Rangiauria, the next us a minute account of their fauna, and larger member of the archipelago, but among other birds he describes the unforeseen circumstances unfortunately wood-hens (Gelinotes) as being interfered, and my investigations in this interesting island consequently terminated here.

fat all the year round and of a most delicat tast. Their color is always of a bright the Plumage between the two sexes. They grey, and there's very little difference in hide their nests so well that we couldn't find 'em out, and consequently did not tast their Eggs. They have a red List (border) about their Eyes, their Beaks are straight and pointed, near two inches long and red also. They cannot fly, their fat makes 'em too heavy for it. If you offer them anything that's red, they are so angry that they will fly at you to catch it out of your Hand,

If, however, I have been unsuccessful in obtaining evidences of the former existence in these islands of the moaexcept the circumstantial statement of Tapu and the Moriori legends -or of the kiwi, I had at least been able, by the discovery of the remains of such characteristic forms of New Zealand life as the tuatara and the weka, the mountain parrot (Nestor notabilis), and and in the heat of the combat we had an the owl, which could not have crossed five hundred miles of sea without other opportunity to take them with ease. aid than their limbs afford, to confirm The bird to which Leguat refers is unmore strongly the botanical evidence doubtedly identical with one described that in ancient days New Zealand and in a State paper found in the Ministry