isolated, and has remained so ever since. Migratory birds from the north visited it, and at a late date two kinds of bat reached it and established themselves. Thus we are prepared for the very curious state of things in this large tract of land. Looking at New Zealand as it was a thousand years ago, we find there were no mammals living on it excepting a couple of bats and the seals (so-called sea lions, sea elephants, and others) which frequent its coasts. There were 180 species of birds, and many of these quite peculiar to the island. Many of the birds showed in the absence of any predatory enemies--there being no carnivorous quadrupeds to hunt them or their young--a tendency to lose the power of flight, and some had done so altogether. The gigantic, wingless Moas--allied to the ostrich and the cassawary--had grown up there, and were the masters of the situation. There were many species of these--one of great height--one fourth taller than the biggest known ostrich; others with short legs of monstrous thickness and strength. Allied to these are the four species of Kiwi or apteryx, still existing there. They are very strange wingless birds, 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.