the carpenter" might be replaced by that of "the microbes and the phagocyte." The saying, "Fine words butter no parsnips," finds a parallel in the remark that "The drinking of drugs does not opsonise microbes." Half-way between us and the amoeba-like unicellular organisms we find the earth-worm preparing his piece of lettuce (as Darwin showed) with a juice exuded from his mouth, a "relish" reminding one of the Kava drink of the South Sea Islanders. To "opsonise" or render attractive by the application of chemical "relish" is a proceeding which we find in operation in the feeding of the minute colourless corpuscles which engorge the still more minute bacteria--and also in the preparation of their food by various lower animals, and finally in the elaborate flavouring and cooking of his food by civilised man! CHAPTER XXIII THE STRANGE STORY OF ANIMAL LIFE IN NEW ZEALAND New Zealand consists of two islands, together more than 1,000 miles long and of about 200,000 square miles area. It is 1,000 miles distant from New Caledonia, the nearest island of any considerable size, and is 1,500 miles from the great Continental island of Australia. There is no other island in the world so large and at the same time so remote from other considerable tracts of land. Australia is closely connected by island groups at a distance of only 100 miles to Asia. The isolation of New Zealand is unique. The seas around it are of vast depth and of proportionately great age. During the chalk period--before the great deposits and changes of the earth's face which we assign to the Tertiary period--New Zealand consisted of a number of small scattered islands, which gradually, as the floor of the sea rose in that part of the world, became a continent stretching northward and joining New Guinea. In that very ancient time the land was covered with ferns and large trees. Birds (as we now know them) had only lately come into existence in the northern hemisphere, and when New Zealand for a time joined that area the birds, as well as a few lizards and one kind of frog, migrated south and colonised the new land. It is probable that the very peculiar lizard-like reptile of New Zealand--the "tuatara" or Sphenodon--entered its area at a still earlier stage of surface change. That creature (only 20 in. long) is the only living representative of very remarkable extinct reptiles which lived in the area which now is England, and, in fact, in all parts of the world, during the Triassic period, further behind the chalk in date than the chalk is behind our own day. For ages, this "type" with its peculiar beak-like jaws, has survived only in New Zealand. Living specimens have been brought to this country, and are to be seen at the Zoological Gardens in Regent's Park. Having received, as it were, a small cargo of birds and reptiles, but no hairy, warm-blooded quadruped, no mammal, New Zealand became at the end of the chalk-period detached from the northern continent, and