Page:Transactions NZ Institute Volume 10.djvu/47

Rh lauded in excellent health and spirits on the deck of a vessel in the Pacific, half that distance from the Australian coast.

If such a fortunate chance occurred, which, however, is scarce possible, and gave a somewhat fairer start to the higher forms of life in New Zealand, their offspring have devoured the race of their ancestors, as until very recently frogs were unknown there; now introduced from Australia in some localities they croak from every pond their appreciation of its swamps, safe from destroying snakes. Touching these same frogs, it appears to have been a want of judgment in their various descendants, a blunder justifying the term of "the aimless action of natural selection," not to have gone on improving and perfecting the attributes possessed by them. None of their progeny being able to jump about and avoid obstacles in their path after the connection between the brain and limbs has been severed, one would imagine that the course of progressive development should have improved, instead of arresting the advantageous capacity enjoyed by some of their analogues and remote progenitors of producing new limbs, and even heads, when accident removes the original ones.

On the whole most persons will prefer to consider the moas the long descended aboriginal inhabitants of this land where they have reigned lords amongst wingless birds from the far distant era when it formed a portion of a great continent, which on the score of antiquity has equal right to be delineated on the map of the old world as Lemuria.

All that is now land has been sea, and the seas land, not once, but probably over, and over, and over again, and as a continuity of the various dry portions of the globe has at one time or another existed (excepting, of course, new lands like the Gallapagos and other volcano-born isles), the ancient connection explains how it came to pass that wingless birds descended from the same original created type are found in South America, in Africa, and in all these islands of the sea.

It seems easier to believe in the tertiary men, who might if they desired, have gone to war mounted on Auchitheriums (for we may be permitted to take for granted that there may have been a family of these creatures large enough to carry their short-legged, ape-like riders), who were there to witness, we are told, the coming upon the stage of the elephantine races, and all the many quaint-looking giant creatures, long passed away, than to imagine that their descendants could have been present at the birth of the first taniwha-descended, post-glacial moa.

Certainly the supporters of this idea may suggest that some of the tertiary men devoted themselves during the long pliocene ages (which, when it suits his argument, are reduced to moderate periods by Professor Haëckel), to the breeding of birds without wings, and achieved in the pursuit success