about the size
of a large Dorking fowl. The Kiwis are still in existence, but the
Moas and some of the other flightless birds have died out since the
arrival of the Maori man, who killed and ate them.

A bird which was believed sixty years ago both by the natives and
white men to have become extinct, the Takahe, or Notornis, was known
by its bones and from the traditions of the natives. Much to the
delight of naturalists, four live specimens of it were obtained at
intervals in the last century, the last as late as 1898. The beautiful
dark plumage and thick and short beak, which is bright red, as are the
legs, are well known from the two specimens preserved in the Natural
History Museum. The Notornis is a heavy, flightless "rail." Rails are
remarkable for their size and variety in New Zealand, where there are
twenty species, some of them very sluggish in flight, or like
Notornis, flightless (the wood hens). Amongst the flightless birds of
New Zealand is a duck, as helpless as the heaviest farmyard product,
and yet a wild bird, and then there are the penguins, which swim with
their wings, but never fly, and belong entirely to the southern
hemisphere. Many species are found on the shores of New Zealand. Other
noteworthy birds of New Zealand are the twelve kinds of cormorants,
the wry-bill plover, the only bird in the world with its beak turned
to one side, the practically flightless Kakapo, or ground parrot
(Stringops), the Huia, a bird like a crow in appearance, whose male
has a short straight beak, whilst the female has a long one, greatly
curved; the detested Kea, the parrot which kills the sheep, introduced
by the colonists, by digging out with its beak from their backs the
fat round the kidneys; also very peculiar owls and wrens, and the fine
singing bell-birds.

The peculiarity of the indigenous animals of New Zealand is seen not
only in the absence of mammals and the abundance of remarkable birds,
many of them flightless, but also in the fact that there are no snakes
in this vast area--no crocodiles, no tortoises--only fourteen small
kinds of lizard (seven Geckoes and seven Skinks), and only one species
of frog (and that only ever seen by a very few persons)! There were
fish in the rivers when settlers arrived there, but none very
remarkable. Insects and flies of every kind, scorpions, spiders,
centipedes, land-snails and earth-worms were all flourishing in the
forests of New Zealand a thousand years ago, serving