Conclusions.

It will be seen from these short notes that the observations made by me in the Province of Canterbury, as to the age and position of the kitchen middens in which the remains of the Moa are to be found, have been fully confirmed by the examination of similar beds at Shag Point, about 200 miles distant. We have always been told that the southern portion of this island must have afforded a shelter to the Moa to a recent date, but the evidence offered by the facts brought to light during these excavations strongly proves the contrary. I may be answered that the Moa may have outlived the Moa-hunters, and we are triumphantly told about Moa-bones with skin and ligaments, even recently found, but I wish to point to the facts brought forward in my paper on the same subject in Vol. IV., “Transactions, New Zealand Institute,” in which I have, and I trust conclusively, shown that there are exceptional causes to which this remarkable preservation is due. When the bones of Megalonyx jeffersoni were found in the Mississippi Valley, which had the cartilages still adhering to them (see “Lethœa geognostica Bronn,” Vol. III., page 1,010), nobody argued from this unusual occurrence that this gigantic sloth had only been extinct for a short time; and, in fact, the very position of the different specimens of the Dinornithidœ found in Otago (the Tiger-hill skeleton, feathers in another locality, and the neck, etc., in the Earnscleugh Cave), proves that they all owed their—sometimes only partial—preservation to peculiarly favourable circumstances, easily to be accounted for. ^*

The change of level between land and sea which took place after the kitchen middens of the Moa-hunter had been formed, and before the shell-fish eating population had visited the same locality, is a further strong evidence that a portion of the Southern Island underwent some physical changes after the time when the Moa became extinct, at least in that part of the country. I have, of