Page:Transactions NZ Institute Volume 10.djvu/45

Rh primordial form, whenever required—granting the possibility of the coming into existence of a body containing an inner principle of life, some mysterious force—that Mr. Bastian's experiments but prove that every atom of what chemists deem dead matter, is pregnant with the power of self-development, merely held in a state of utmost tension, from which it is ready to spring forward into life, when chance is given—discharging from their minds any such "emotional sensation" as the process being in obedience to a creative power—the believers in this place of refuge amidst the ice have to solve the problem how it came to pass that the progeny of the primordial form went through all the stages, which required thousands of millions of years, according to his own teaching, to accomplish before, so successfully in the new centre of creation, New Zealand.

How the gigantic birds were quickly elaborated from their reptilian progenitors, and these from theirs during the brief space of the post-glacial age. If time is necessary for any important process of evolution, it must have been for this supposed wonderful transformation of the cold-blooded, solid-boned, scale-covered lizard, into the hot-blooded, hollow-boned, feathered birds, and the latter have certainly flourished in high perfection in New Zealand it will be admitted from most remote times.

We know from the history of Australia, during late geological ages, that the ancestors of the moas could not have migrated from thence. The connection between New Zealand and the north-east of New Holland, New Guinea, Celebes, the Aru Islands, and other small marsupial strongholds, portions once of the ancient bird-inhabited Pacific Continent, was severed in a far distant era, when the marsupial line of life had not perhaps advanced beyond the assumed stage of its batrachian infancy.

In that old land of Oceanica, or Apteryxia we may designate it, the lizard race had already far risen in the scale of being, and if the pedigree be true, some tribes of their feathered descendants had colonized its northeastern regions, where their representatives remain to this day; one family especially having held its ground well. The emu was not to disappear before the new marsupials any more than its analogue in South America, which probably tells us of a more ancient story still in the history of land and sea; the cassowary also has remained in tropical Australia, although the nearer ally of the Dinornis, its rival in size, whose remains have been discovered by the Rev. Mr. Clarke, F.R.S., had not been able to continue its race. On the mountain tops of the submerged continent, representatives of its most ancient denizens also survive. New Britain, New Ireland, and Ceram have their cassowaries as well as New Holland and New Guinea, and the great southern peninsula was in complete possession of the grandest specimens of the ornithic race for long ages after its separation by a wide sea