in large measure
as the food of birds, fish and lizards. The great island continent of
Australia, 1,500 miles away, is peculiar enough in its living
products, quite unlike the rest of the world in its egg-laying
duck-mole and spiny ant-eater, and in its abundant and varied
population of pounched mammals or marsupials, emphasized by the
absence (except for two or three peculiar little mice and the
late-arrived black-fellow and bush-dog) of the regular type called
"placental" mammals which inhabit the rest of the world. The rest of
the world except New Zealand! Strange as Australia is, New Zealand is
yet stranger. Long as the isolation of Australia has endured, and
archaic and primitive in essential characters as is its living freight
of animals and plants navigated (as it were) in safety and isolation
to our present days, yet New Zealand has a still more primitive, a
more ancient cargo. When we divide the land surfaces of the earth
according to their history as indicated by the nature of their living
fauna and flora and their geological structure, and the fossilised
remains of their past inhabitants, it becomes necessary to separate
the whole land surface into two primary sections: (_a_) New Zealand,
and (_b_) the rest of the world, "Theriogoea," or the land of beasts
(mammals). Then we divide Theriogoea into (1) the land of Marsupials
(Australia) and (2) the land of Placentals (the rest of the world).
This last great area is divisible according to the same principles
into the great northern belt of land, the Holarctic region and the
(three not equally distinct) great southward-reaching land
surfaces--the Neo-tropical (South America), the Ethiopian (Africa,
south of the Sahara), and the Oriental (India and Malay).

The bird-ruled quietude of New Zealand was disturbed 500 years ago by
the arrival of the Polynesian Islanders, the Maoris, in their canoes.
They brought with them three kinds of vegetables which they
cultivated, a dog and a kind of rat. The dogs soon died out, but the
rat has remained, and is considered to have done little or no harm. It
was not one of the destructive proliferous rats of the northern
hemisphere. The Maoris hunted the big birds--the Moas and others--for
their flesh, and ate their eggs, and it is probable that they caused
or accelerated the extinction of the Moa and two or three other birds.
In the north island they nearly exterminated the white heron, the
plumes being valued by them. On the w