So the ostrich lives its life in Africa, from Algeria right down to Cape Colony; while its smaller and lighter-coloured relations, the Rheas, with their _three-toed_ feet, course over the plains of Paraguay and Brazil, on the other side of the Atlantic, often swimming from island to island, in the bays or across the rivers, but quite unable to fly with their soft hair-like feathers, though their wings are larger than those of the ostrich. Then when we turn to the East we find other running birds; the Cassowary, with its three toes, its horny helmet, its five long single feathers, and its five naked pointed quills in the place of a wing, feeding on fruit and vegetables in New Guinea, or sharing the dreary scrubs of Australia with the almost wingless Emus wandering in pairs, the only constant married couples among the running birds. Nor is New Zealand left without a representative of this family, for there we have the curious little Apteryx or Kiwi (Fig. 36), with its thick stumpy legs, its long beak, and its soft downy body, under which are hidden its aborted wings. Perhaps it is because he is small and insignificant that the apteryx has lived on till now, crouching under the bushes by day and creeping about in the twilight, thrusting his long nose-tipped beak into the damp ground to draw out the worms. For long ago, though in the memory of man, as we learn from the traditions of the Maories, other wingless birds called Moas,[97] which were six or seven feet high, lived in New Zealand, and had fierce fights with the natives. We find their bones now, often charred from having been cooked in the native ovens, and when they are put together they give us skeletons which show that these birds must have been as formidable as that great bird of Madagascar, the Æpyornis, whose gigantic bones and eggs, three times the size of ostrich eggs, have been found, though the bird itself has never been seen. [Illustration: Fig. 36. Wingless birds of New Zealand. The giant Moa (_Palapteryx_) and the tiny Apteryx. The Moa is no longer to be found alive.] But these are gone now, and their relations the Emus are fast following them: for however well these flightless birds may flourish on the broad plains and deserts, where only their wild companions are around them, they are sadly at the mercy of man. The proud eagle can fly far beyond the reach of the hunter’s gun; the little lark, if she be only wary enough, may trill out her song in the blue vault above and leave the cruel destroyer far below; but the emu and the cassowary, the rhea and the ostrich, have lost the power to leave the earth; and if it were not that we prize the two last for their feathers, they, too, like their companions, might live to rue the day when they became runners instead of conquerors of the air. * * * * *