As we pass along a narrow corridor in which the ostriches are confined, we reach at length the last inhabitant of the garden, and the most curious creature, perhaps, which it contains. If the keeper is at hand, he will open the door of the box in which it lives, and drive out for us the bewildered-looking apteryx--the highest representative, according to Professor Owen, of the warm-blooded class of animals that lived in New Zealand previous to the advent of man. Strange and chaotic-looking as are most of the living things brought from Australia and the adjacent islands, this creature is certainly the oddest of the bird class, and is, we believe, the only one ever seen out of New Zealand. As it vainly runs into the corners and tries to hide itself from the light of day, we perceive that it is wingless and tailless; it looks, in short, like a hedgehog mounted upon the dwarfed yet powerful legs of an ostrich, whilst its long bill, which seems as though it had been borrowed from a stork, is employed when the bird leans forward, to support it, just as an old man uses a stick. This strange creature seems to hold among the feathered bipeds of Polynesia a parallel position to the New Holland mole (_Ornithorhynchus paradoxicus_)--which possesses the bill and webbed feet of a duck with the claws of a land animal--among the quadrupeds. Mr. Gould remarks that nature affords an appropriate vegetation to each class of animal life. Our universal mother seems to have matched her Flora to her Fauna in this portion of the globe; at least, the paradoxical creatures we have mentioned seem in happy accord with Australian vegetation, where the stones grow outside the cherries, and the pear-shaped fruits depend from the branch with their small ends downwards! The apteryx is entirely nocturnal in its habits, pursuing its prey in the ground by smell rather than by sight; to enable it to do which, the olfactory openings are placed near the point of the beak. Thus the bird scents the worm on which it feeds far below the surface of the ground. We must not regard the apteryx as an exceptional creature, but rather as the type of a large class of birds peculiar to the islands of New Zealand, which have been destroyed, like the dodo in the Mauritius, since the arrival of man. Professor Owen, long before the apteryx arrived in England, pronounced that a single bone found in some New Zealand watercourse had belonged to a wingless, tailless bird that stood at least twelve feet high.[9] This scientific conjecture has lately been transformed into a certainty by the discovery of a number of bones, which demonstrate that several species of Moas once roamed among the fern-clad islands which stud the bright Polynesian ocean. These bones have been found mixed with those of the apteryx, which thus becomes linked to a race of mysterious creatures, which, it is supposed, have long passed away, although a tale is told--an American one, it is true--of an