the New Zealand colossi, and of dimensions not widely remote from
theirs. Professor Owen thinks that it did not exceed in height or size
_Dinornis giganteus_, and that there is a probability that it was
slightly smaller. The Madagascar bird has been named _AEpyornis
maximus_.
The fragments of the egg of the New Zealand bird (still uncertain as to
the species to which it is to be referred) shew that the shell was
absolutely thinner, and therefore relatively _much_ thinner than that of
the Ostrich's egg; the air-pores, too, have a different form, being
linear, instead of round, and the surface is smoother. In these
qualities, the New Zealand egg resembles that of the _Apteryx_; in the
thickness and roughness of the egg of _AEpyornis_ there is more
similarity to those of the Ostrich and Cassowary. The colour of the
Madagascar egg is a dull greyish yellow; but it is possible that this
may be derived from the soil in which it has long been imbedded. The
fragments of the New Zealand egg are white, like the eggs of the
_Apteryx_ and Ostrich: those of the Emu and Cassowary are light green.
The willing fancy suggests the possibility that, in an island of such
immensity as Madagascar, possessing lofty mountain-ranges, covered with
the most magnificent forests, where civilised man has only yet touched
one or two spots on the seaward borders, but where these slight
explorations have educed so many wondrous animals, so many strange forms
of vegetable life, the noble _AEpyornis_ may yet be stalking with giant
stride along the fern-fringed hill-sides, or through the steaming
thickets; though in the more contracted area of New Zealand its equally
ponderous cousins, the _Dinornis_ and the _Palapteryx_, may have sunk
beneath the persevering persecutions of man.
Yet another item of evidence bearing on the recent if not present
existence of these great fowls has recently come to light:--the most
interesting discovery that one of the genera whose fossil remains had
been found associated with theirs is really extant in New Zealand. I
refer to the _Notornis_.
At a meeting of the Zoological Society of London, held on the 13th
November 1850, Dr Mantell made the following communication relative to
this discovery:--
"It was in the course of last year, on the occasion of my son's second
visit to the south of the middle island, that he had the good fortune to
secure the recent _Notornis_, which I now submit, having previously
placed it in the hands of the eminent ornithologist Mr Gould, to figure
and describe. This bird was taken by some sealers who were pursuing
their avocations in Dusky Bay. Perceiving the trail of a large and
unknown bird on the snow, with which the ground was then covered, they
followed the footprints till they obtained a sight of the _Notornis_,
which their dogs instantly pursued, and, after a long chase, caught
alive in the gully of a sound behind Resolution Island. It ran with
great speed, and on being captured uttered loud screams, and fought and
struggled violently. It was kept alive three or four days on board the
schooner, and then killed, and the body roasted and eaten by the crew,
each partaking of the dainty, which was declared to be delicious. The
beak and legs were of a bright red colour. My son secured the skin,
together with very fine specimens of the Kapapo or ground parrot
(_Strigops_), a pair of Huias (_Neomorpha_), and two species of
Kiwikiwi, namely _Apteryx Australis_, and _A. Oweni_. The latter very
rare bird is now added to the collection of the British Museum."
"Mr Walter Mantell states, that, according to the native traditions, a
large Rail was contemporary with the Moa, and formed a principal article
of food among their ancestors. It was known to the North Islanders by
the name 'Moho,' and to the South Islanders by that of 'Takahe;' but the
bird was considered by both natives and Europeans to have been long
since exterminated by the wild cats and dogs; not an individual having
been seen or heard of since the arrival of the English colonists. On
comparing the head of the bird with the fossil cranium, and mandibles,
and the figures and descriptions in the 'Zoological Transactions' (Plate
lvi.), my son was at once convinced of their identity. It may not be
irrelevant to add, that in the course of Mr Walter Mantell's journey
from Banks's Peninsula along the coast to Otago, he learned from the
natives that they believed there still existed in that country the only
indigenous terrestrial quadruped, except a species of rat, which there
are any reasonable grounds for concluding New Zealand ever possessed.
While encamping at Arowenua, in the district of Timaru, the Maoris
assured them that about ten miles inland there was a quadruped which
they called Kaureke, and that it was formerly abundant, and often kept
by their ancestors in a domestic state as a pet animal. It was described
as about two feet in length, with coarse grizzly hair; and must have
more nearly resembled the otter or badger than the beaver or the
Ornithorhynchus, which the first accounts seem to suggest as the
probable type. The offer of a liberal reward induced some of the Maoris
to start for the interior of the country where the Kaureke was supposed
to be located; but they returned without having obtained the slightest
trace of the existence of such an animal. My son, however, expresses his
belief in the native accounts, and that, if the creature no longer
exists, its extermination is of very recent date. In concluding this
brief narrative of the discovery of a genus of birds once contemporary
with the colossal Moa, and hitherto only known by its fossil remains, I
beg to remark that this highly interesting fact tends to confirm the
conclusions expressed in my communication to the Geological Society,
namely, that the _Dinornis_, _Palapteryx_, and related forms, were
coeval with some of the existing species of birds peculiar to New
Zealand, and that their final extinction took place at no very distant
period, and long after the advent of the aboriginal Maoris."
Mr Gould then read a paper pointing out the zoological characters of the
bird discovered by Mr Mantell, which he had no hesitation in identifying
as the species formerly characterised, from its osseous remains, by
Professor Owen, under the name of _Notornis Mantelli_. Mr Gould, in
adverting to the extreme interest with which the present existence of a
species which was certainly contemporary with the Moa must be regarded,
pointed out, from the preserved skin, which was on the table, how
accurate a prevision of its character had been made by Professor Owen,
when investigating the fragments from which our first knowledge of it
had been derived.[19]
At length I come home to Great Britain and Ireland--the "nice little,
tight little islands" where so many of our sympathies properly centre,
where natural-history facts and all other facts interest us so much more
than parallel facts elsewhere, and where, above all, there are so many
more lights streaming into the darkness, and bringing out truth. Let us
again look back to the period of the Bison, and Reindeer, and Elk, of
the Elephant, and Hippopotamus, and Rhinoceros, of the Lion and the
Hyena, and the great Cave Bear, and search among the vanishing traces of
the far past for glimpses of evidence when their age ceased to be.
Some dim light falls on the obscurity from the discovery of the fossil
remains of man himself--the human bones found by Dr Schmerling in a
cavern near Liege, the remains mentioned by M. Marcel de Serres and
others in several caverns in France, associated with fossil relics of
this period. But more from the occurrence of flints, apparently
fashioned by human art, in superficial deposits, together with the same
extinct fossils of the tertiary. Even at the very moment that I write
this sheet, my eye falls on the report[20] of an important meeting of
the Ethnological Society, for the purpose of discussing this very
subject of "The flint implements found associated with the bones of
extinct animals in the Drift." Many of the leading geologists and
archaeologists were present, for the matter has become one of absorbing
interest, conflicting, as the facts seem to do, with some assumptions
received as unquestioned verities in Geology.
These flints, which seem indubitably to have been chipped into the forms
of arrow-heads, lance-heads, and the like, have been found in France in
large numbers, as also in other parts of the continent, and in England.
They resemble those still used by some savage tribes. In this very
neighbourhood, as in the cavern called Kent's Hole near Torquay, and in
one more recently examined at Brixham, they are found mixed up with the
bones of the Rhinoceros, of the Cave Bear, and the Hyena, At
Menchecourt, near Abbeville, they occur in a deposit of sand, sandy
clay, and marl, with bones of the same animals, and others, their
contemporaries. Concerning this bed, Mr Prestwich, in a paper read
before the Royal Society, May 26, 1859, says that it must be referred to
those usually designated as post pliocene, but that the period of its
deposit was anterior to that of the surface assuming its present
outline, so far as some of its minor features are concerned. "He does
not, however, consider that the facts of necessity carry man back in
past time more than they _bring forward the great extinct mammals
towards our own time_, the evidence having reference only to relative,
and not to absolute time; and he is of opinion that many of the later
geological changes may have been sudden, or of shorter duration than
generally considered. In fact, from the evidence here exhibited, and
from all that he knows regarding the drift phenomena generally, the
author sees no reason against the conclusion that this period of man and
the extinct mammals--supposing their contemporaneity to be proved--was
brought to a sudden end by a temporary inundation of the land; on the
contrary, he sees much to support such a view on purely geological
considerations."[21]
At the meeting of the Ethnological Society just held, there seems to
have been an increasing tendency to admit the hypothesis of the
continuance of the Mammalia of the Tertiary into the human era. Mr
Evans, who exhibited specimens taken at a depth of twenty to thirty
feet, from a stratum of coarse fresh-water gravel, lying on chalk, and
containing an entire skeleton of an extinct Rhinoceros, and overlaid by
sandy marl containing existing shells, shewed that the deposit had
certainly not been disturbed till the present time, so that the gravel,
the bones, and the flints had been deposited coetaneously. He suggested
"that the animals supposed to have become extinct before man was created
might have continued to exist to more recent periods than had been
admitted." And this opinion found support from other leading geologists.
That this conclusion would throw the existence of man to an era far
higher than that assigned to him by the inspired Word, is, I know,
generally held; and certain investigations, made in the alluvial deposit
of the Nile,[22] are considered to prove that man has been living in a
state of comparative civilisation in the Nile Valley for the last
13,500 years. But that conclusion absolutely rests on the supposition
that the rate of increase formed by the annual deposit of the Nile mud
has been always exactly the same as now,--a supposition, not only
without the least shadow of proof, but also directly contrary to the
highest probability, nay, certainty, in the estimation of those who
believe in the Noachian deluge. For surely the drainage of the entire
plain of North Africa after that inundation must have produced an
alluvium of vast thickness in a very brief time; while beneath that
deposit the works of the antediluvian world might well be buried. Yet
the possibility of there ever having been any greater rate of deposit
than within the last 3000 years, the recorder of those investigations,
in his unseemly haste to prove the Bible false, strangely leaves wholly
out of his consideration.
So, doubtless, concerning other deposits containing fossil remains,
whose extreme antiquity is assumed from the known rate of
surface-increase now, we ought to remember that we have not a tittle of
proof that the rate of increase has not at certain remote periods been
suddenly and immensely augmented. There are many facts on record which
tend to shew that the rate at which geologic changes take place in
certain localities affords no reliable data whatever to infer that at
which phenomena apparently quite parallel have occurred in other
localities. An upheaval or a subsidence of one part of a country may
rapidly effect a great change in the amount of soil or gravel
precipitated by streams, without destroying or changing their channels,
and yet the deposit may be made sufficiently gradually to allow the
burial of shells or of bones of creatures which lived and died on the
spot.
The degradation of a cliff, either suddenly or gradually, might throw a
vast quantity of fragments into a rapid stream, and cause a deposit of
gravel of considerable breadth and thickness in a comparatively short
period of time,--say a century or two.
Sir Charles Lyell has adduced examples of very rapid formation of
certain stony deposits, which should make us cautious how we assert that
such and such a thickness _must_ have required a vast number of years.
In one of them there is a thickness of 200 or 300 feet of travertine of
recent deposit, while in another, a solid mass _thirty feet thick was
deposited in about twenty years_. There are countless places in Italy
where the formation of limestone may be seen, as also in Auvergne and
other volcanic districts.[23]
From these and similar considerations it seems to me by no means
unreasonable that the four thousand years which elapsed between the
Creation and the commencement of Western European history should have
been amply sufficient for many of those geological operations whose
results are seen in what are known as the later Tertiary deposits,--the
crag, the drift, the cavern-accumulations, and the like. And, as a
corollary to this, that the great extinct Mammalia may have extended
into this period, and thus have been contemporary with man, for a
greater or less duration, according to the species; some, probably,
having been extinguished at a very early period of the era, while others
lived on to the time I have named, or even later.
But have we nothing better for this conclusion than an assumption of the
possibility, and a more or less probable conjecture? Yes; we have some
facts of interest to warrant it, or I should not have ventured to
introduce the subject in this work. There are facts,--besides the
admixture of human workmanship with the animal remains in undisturbed
deposits--direct evidence, not altogether shadowy, of the co-existence
of the extinct animals with living men.
And first, I would mention some circumstances bearing analogy to the
exhumation of the fresh Pachyderms of Siberia. Some years ago, a portion
of the leg of an Irish Elk, so-called, (_Megaceros hibernicus_,) with a
part of the tendons, skin, and hair upon it, was dug up with other
remains from a deposit on the estate of H. Grogan Morgan, Esq., of
Johnstown Castle, Wexford, and is now in that gentleman's possession.
This leg was exhibited, and formed the subject of a lecture at the time
by Mr Peile, veterinary surgeon, Dublin.
It has been ascertained that the marrow in some of the bones blazes like
a candle; that the cartilage and gelatine, so far from having been
destroyed, were not apparently altered by time.[24] Archdeacon Maunsell
actually made soup of the bones, and presented a portion thereof to the
Royal Dublin Society (whether they enjoyed it I have not heard; it must
have been "a little high," I fear). They are frequently used by the
peasantry for fuel. On the occasion of the rejoicings for the victory at
Waterloo, a bonfire was made of these bones, and it was observed that
they gave out as good a blaze as those of horses, often used for similar
purposes.[25]
Pepper, in his "History of Ireland," states that the ancient Irish used
to hunt a very large black deer, the milk of which they used as we do
that of the cow, and the flesh of which served them for food, and the
skin for clothing. This is a very remarkable record; and is confirmed by
some bronze tablets found by Sir William Betham, the inscriptions on
which attested that the ancient Irish fed upon the milk and flesh of a
great black deer.
According to the "Annals of the Four Masters," Niel Sedamin, a king of
Ireland before the Christian era, was so called because "the cows and
the female deer were alike milked in his reign." The art of taming the
wild deer and converting them into domestic cattle is said to have been
introduced by Flidisia, this monarch's mother. Deer are said to have
been used to carry stones and wood for Codocus when his monastery was
built, as also to carry timber to build the castle of a king of
Connaught. These may have been red deer, but as there is good proof
that the giant deer was really domesticated, it seems more likely that
such offices should have been performed by the latter than by the
former.
An interesting letter from the Countess of Moira, published in the
"Archaeologia Britannica," gives an account of a human body found in
gravel under eleven feet of peat, soaked in the bog-water; it was in
good preservation, and completely clothed in antique garments of
deer-hair, conjectured to be that of the Giant Elk.
A skull of the same animal has been discovered in Germany in an ancient
drain, together with several urns and stone-hatchets. And in the museum
of the Royal Dublin Society there exists a fossil rib bearing evident
token of having been wounded by some sharp instrument which remained
long infixed in the wound, but had not penetrated so deep as to destroy
the creature's life. It was such a wound as the head of an arrow,
whether of flint or of metal, would produce.
In the year 1846, a very interesting corroboration of the opinion long
held by some that the great broad-horned Deer was domesticated by the
ancient Irish, was given by the discovery of a vast collection of bones
at Lough Gur, near Limerick. The word Gur is said to mean "an
assemblage," so that the locality is "the Lake of the Assemblage,"
commemorating perhaps the gathering of an army or some other host at the
spot. In the midst of the lake is an island, which is described as being
so completely surrounded with bones and skulls of animals "that one
would think the cattle of an entire nation must have been slaughtered to
procure so vast an assemblage."
The skulls are described as belonging to the following animals:--The
giant deer (females); a deer of inferior size; the stag; another species
of stag; the fallow deer; the broad-faced ox; the hollow-faced ox; the
long-faced ox; another species of ox; the common short-horned ox; the
goat; and the hog.
The principal points of interest centred in the Giant Deer or so-called
Irish Elk. The skulls of these, as of all the larger animals, "were
broken in by some sharp and heavy instrument, and in the same manner as
butchers of the present day slaughter cattle for our markets, and in
many cases the marrow-bones were broken across, as if to get at the
marrow."
Of course, if this was indubitable, the conclusion was inevitable, that
the Giant Deer was not only contemporary with man, but was domesticated
by him with other quadrupeds, and used for food. Professor Owen,
however, contended that the skulls of the Giant Deer were not females
but males, from which the horns had been forcibly removed, and that the
holes in the foreheads were made by the violent wrenching off of the
horns tearing away a portion of the frontal bone from which they grew.
In reply to this opinion, Mr H. D. Richardson of Dublin, whose personal
acquaintance with the relics of this noble species is peculiarly
extensive, shewed that certain variations of proportion on which the
learned Professor relied to prove the skulls to be male, were of no
such value, individual animals presenting great discrepancies in these
respects: that the total absence of cornuous peduncles from the sides of
the forehead, and of the elevated bony ridge, conclusively proved the
sex to be female, which was permanently destitute of horns; and that in
no case could it be said that the ridge was forced away, since the
violence was confined to a _small hole_ in the centre of the forehead.
To put the matter to test, Mr Richardson experimented on two perfect
male skulls. In the one instance the force was applied to the beam of
the horns, and the result was their fracture where they are united to
the peduncles. In the other case the force was applied to the peduncles
themselves, to ascertain whether it was possible to wrench them and the
ridge away from the face, when the consequence was, that the skull was
completely riven asunder. Indeed to any one who looks at the position of
the horns in this animal, and their implantation, it must be
self-evident that their violent removal must tear away the entire
forehead, and not leave a central hole. Mr Edward Newman who
subsequently examined the specimens speaks decidedly on this point:--"I
have not the least hesitation in expressing my firm conviction that the
fractures were the result of human hands, and were the cause of the
death of the animals. These two fractured skulls correspond too exactly
with each other, and with that of a bullock with which I compared them,
to have resulted from accident: the edges of the fractures wore the
appearance of having been coeval with the interment or submergence of
the skulls, and presented a very strikingly different appearance from a
fracture recently made, and which I had the opportunity of examining.
There were several skulls of the male of the same species, one bearing
enormous antlers, but none exhibiting the slightest trace of frontal
fracture."[26]
A circumstance of much importance is that these skulls were found in
company with those of many well-known domestic animals, as the ox, the
goat, and the hog. _These skulls were similarly fractured._ As it is
evident that _their_ demolition was produced by the butcher's pole-axe,
why not that of the elk-skulls?
"At the first cursory glance, it may appear somewhat strange that the
skulls of the males should invariably have been found entire, and that
even the recent discovery at Lough Gur should form no exception.
"I do not, however, find any difficulty here. In the first place, we may
fairly suppose that males, like our bulls, were not equally prized as
food. In the second place, the size, as well as the position of the
antlers, would render it next to an impossibility to give the desired
blow with the pole-axe. In the third place, the greater strength and
thickness of the skull would almost to a certainty render the blow
unavailing; and in the fourth place, supposing the females domesticated,
and the occasional tenants of sheds and other buildings, we may well
imagine that the males were excluded from such buildings by the enormous
size of their antlers. Perhaps a few only of the males, as in our
cattle, were suffered to become adult, one male sufficing for many
females. Perhaps the males were allowed free range, the females only
being permitted at stated seasons to accompany them. In fine, the more
we investigate probabilities, the more we reason from present experience
and knowledge, the less difficulty shall we find in the way of believing
the gigantic deer of Ireland an animal coeval with man and subservient
to his uses."[27]