Part 4

And well may the colossus have inspired fear. The bones sent to London greatly exceed in bulk those of the largest horse. The leg-bone of a tall man is about one foot four inches in length, and the thigh of O'Brien, the Irish giant, whose skeleton, eight feet high, is mounted in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, is not quite two feet. But the leg-bone (_tibia_) of the _Dinornis_ we know measured as much as two feet ten inches, and we have no reason to suppose, considering the disparity that exists in the specimens examined, that we have seen by any means the largest.

Additional reason for supposing these magnificent birds to have existed not long ago, is found in the fact that specimens of their eggs have been preserved. The circumstances attendant on the discovery and identification of these possess a remarkable interest. In the volcanic sand of New Zealand Mr Walter Mantell found a gigantic egg, which we may reasonably infer to be that of either _Dinornis_ or _Palapteryx_, of the magnitude of which he gives us a familiar idea by saying that his hat would have been but just large enough to have served as an egg-cup for it. This is the statement of a man of science, and therefore we may assume an approximate degree of precision in the comparison.

I do not know the size of Mr Mantell's hat, but I find that the transverse diameter of my own is six inches or a little more. If we may take this as the shorter diameter of the ovoid, the longer would probably be about eight and a half inches; dimensions considerably greater than those of the Ostrich's egg (which are about six and a quarter in length), but not what we should have expected from a bird from twelve to fourteen feet in height. And this the rather when we consider that the egg of the New Zealand _Apteryx_, to which these birds manifest a very close affinity, is one of dimensions that are quite surprising in proportion to the bulk of the bird. The Apteryx is about as big as a turkey, standing two feet in height, but its egg measures four inches ten lines by three inches two lines in the respective diameters. The egg of the _Dinornis giganteus_, to bear the same ratio to the bird as this, would be of the incredible length of two feet and a half, by a breadth of one and three quarters! Possibly this specimen, though indubitably the egg of one of this great family of extinct birds, may after all be that of one of the subordinate species.

But about the same time as Mr Mantell's discovery, one of equal interest was made in Madagascar. The master of a French ship obtained, in 1850, from natives of the island, three eggs, of far greater size, and fragments of the leg-bones of an immense bird. These, on their arrival at Paris, formed the subjects of valuable investigations by M. Isidore Geoffroy St Hilaire[16] and Professor Owen.[17]

The native statement was, that one of the eggs had been found entire in the bed of a torrent, among the debris of a land-slip; that a second egg, with some fragments of bone, was subsequently found in a formation _which is stated to be alluvial_; a third egg, which the natives had perforated at one end, and used as a vessel, was also found. This last egg was broken in the carriage, the other two arrived in Europe entire.

These two, though nearly alike in size, differed considerably in their relative proportions and shape, the one being shorter and thicker, with more equal ends than the other. The following table shews the dimensions of both compared with those of an ostrich's egg:--

Ovoid egg. Ellipsoid egg. Ostrich egg. ft. in. li. ft. in. li. ft. in. li. Longer circumference 2 10 9 2 9 6 1 6 0 Shorter circumference 2 4 3 2 5 6 1 4 6 Extreme length 1 0 8 1 0 5 0 6 4

M. Geoffroy St Hilaire estimates the larger of the two to contain 10-1/8 quarts, or the contents of nearly six eggs of the Ostrich, or sixteen of the Cassowary, or a hundred and forty-eight of the Hen, or fifty thousand of the Humming bird.[18]

The fragments of bone indicated a bird of the same natural affinities as 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 _Æpyornis 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 _Æpyornis_ 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 _Æpyornis_ 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 Káureke, 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 Káureke 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 archæologists 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 "Archæologia 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 Gûr, near Limerick. The word Gûr 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."