from the nearest portion of the ancient land, as Madagascar remained, no doubt, also for long ages, the happy home of the Æpyornis after Lemuria went down.
But if ignoring these considerations which seem to make the history of New Zealand certain, as that of the other large insular countries mentioned, and all the many old islands of the sea, to whose venerable story Mr. Wallace says, fearlessly, their inhabitants give us the key; if disregarding the absence of all evidence of its ever having been covered with an ice-cap, and that there is no possible reason for alleging it to be a logical conclusion that it must have been so covered, the glacial enthusiasts will risk their belief in all things else, so long as they can picture to their minds this island in the sea of ice, where all was war and carnage; if, instead of the moas being the long descended representatives of a royal race of birds, come from one of the most ancient aboriginal families upon earth, they deem them mere creatures of yesterday, modern adventurers, it is clear that they must be prepared to admit that their advancement must have been most improperly rapid.
Their lacertilian forefathers, and theirs before them, must have been addicted to saltatory practices more daring than those of our proved American cousin, that strange Mexican batrachian the irrepressible axolotl; and have set at defiance the old established laws of slow progressive development followed in all other epochs, as laid down emphatically in the Theory of Descent, endangering the foundations of that edifice, so far as immeasurable time is requisite for the safety of its construction.
Their advance in life must have been far more precipitate than that made by the inhabitants of the Gallapagos, where the frogs or allied batrachian patriarchs have no nobler descendants than the lizard and the tortoise, and yet these families can probably trace their descent from ancestors of fair standing in the world, when they first landed on the scarce cooled lavas. Gay sea-going lacertians, and slumbering chelonians on some floating log may have reached their shores, and from their eggs came the few four-footed creatures domiciled in these islands, amongst them the little altered descendant of one of them, nearly the last of its race, the only marine lizard now known. The ocean depths may however be tenanted still by forms of life we little imagine. Or, notwithstanding the antipathy the batrachian race evince to being cooped up in isolated regions, the Gallapagos population may have a more ancient local pedigree, and be descended from the survivors of a shower of young frogs. The distance is not too great to suppose the possibility of their having been caught up in some strong revolving storm from an American pool and carried thus far; it is not long since a number of these creatures were
