A SCIENTIFIC STORY.

Observer, Volume XL, Issue 7, 18 October 1919, Page 19

A SCIENTIFIC STORY.

IT will be remembered tliat Mr. Ivan Levy, a Wellington "Times" reporter, wrote a ''living Moa" y.arri in the Christchurch "Weekly Press." It was excellent fiction, written purposely to appear as though the narrated events actually occurred. America saw the yarn! It will be noted in the following scientific article from "The American Weekly," that Mr. Ivan Levy, of Wellington, becomes "Dr. Ivan Levey," an English explorer, who seems to have returned to the United States from the wilds of this moa-rridden country. As a matter of fact, Ivan's still in Wellington :—

Not for many years has science had presented to it so interesting or so suggestive an experience as that of Dr. Ivan Levey, a British explorer, who has just returned from an expedition in New Zealand, whore he met and was forced to battle for his life with a giant bird long believed to be extinct. Brief announcements of Dr. Levey's fight with the monster have come from London, and can now be amplified by his personal recital to scientific bodies there. Indeed, so great is the interest aroused that plans are being made to send an expedition at once into New Zealand to the locality described by the explorer to try to secure, if possible, a living specimen.

Incidentally, his story * opens up again the question of the possibility of other monsters, thought long vanished, but which tales of travellers and natives in various remote parts of the globe have persistently recorded as still existing.

Scientists, checking up the description of this mammoth bird with which Dr. Levey battled, believes it to have been one of the most gigantic forms of the moa, whose fossils have frequently been dug up on the various islands of the New Zealand group. For years natives of these islands have testified to their existence in unfrequented sections, but their stories have never heretofore been confirmed by any creditable observer.

According to Dr. Levey's recital, he was making mineral and geological investigations in the mountain near Cape Palliser, on Cook's Strait. This is the southernmost extremity of North Island. He had achieved a hazardous ascent one morning up to a table land in the. mountains, about 1,000 feet above sea level. It was thickly wooded with kauri pine and tree fern, while the underbrush was almost impenetrable.

He had set out for a ledge which promised a reward for his laborious climb, when he was arrested by an unfamiliar, deep-booming sound, apparently coming from the direction of a little clearing in the'thick foliage before him. Through the vista he could see the sea shimmering below in the .sunlight.

He crept forward to investigate —through the undergrowth which stood waist-high between him and the sun-bathed ledge.

•"Just as I stepped forward," he says, "to push through the barrier, there appeared above the brush, not six feet away, what first seemed to me the head of a tremendous reptile. Inch by inch the head rose, higher and higher, seemingly unwinding from a coil. The neck appeared interminable. I then became conscious that it was not a reptile, but some feathered thing. and I turned to seek a safer haven for observation. I had scarce turned when it was upon me, jaws agape, emitting a terrifying, booming roar.

"The huge body bowled me over, and a ponderous, long-clawed foot gashed my leg deeply. I succeeded in writhing from under its feet, and started toward the clearing for the sunjit ledge, The undergrowth

MORE MOA FROM MAORILAND. An American Adaptation.

prevented me taking any other direction. I had no sooner risen than I was bowled over again by,a glancing blow between the shoulder blades from its great bill and neck. There seemed to be the power of a steam hammer in its. long, sinuous neck, and fortunately it did not strike me directly, or it would have killed me. Again I was on my back, the heavy feet clawing about my body, and the weird head, lowered, pocking at me incessantly. My knife had slipped from its sheath at the first attack, so all the defence I had was my bare hands.

"I secured a firm hold with both hands on the sharp, scaly leg which pinned me, and with a twisting wrench 1 was able to writhe away for a second time. I had a fair start, and I dashed headlong through the clearing and across the ledge to the very edge. The thing, again fortunately, did not seem to be able to run fast for all its size. The lodge shelved at an angle of about 45 degrees to a pool of water below. I went tumbling down the incline for about fifty feet, and struck the water. A short and the quickest swim I ever took brought me to the roots of a tall pine tree, which I was about to climb, when I looked back for my terrible adversary. It was gone. It must have stopped at the ledge, however, for I did not catch a glimpse of it again."

Dr. Levey, being then alone, did not wait to carry on any further investigations. He further describes the bird as being from fifteen to twenty feet high, with a neck that seemed to have the power of contracting and elongating in serpent fashion, the body huge and bulky, its colour brown, wingless, legs massive like an elephant's, with three-toed feet "simply ponderous." Its head was very small. From his description, the bird appears to have been dinornis maximus, meaning great, terrible bird; but from hie description of the legs and feet it would seem to have been pachyornis elephantopus, meaning a bird with massive feet like that of the elephant.

Both these birds belong to the species called moas, and less than a thousand years ago there were some twenty kinds of moas on the islands of New Zealand, which, by the way, were once all one body of land of truf continental dimensions.

Of these Moas, Lucas says:— '■The moas were first brought to notice by Bishop W. Colenso, on? of the many missionaries to whom science is- under obligations." Early in 1838, in the East Cape region, he heard from the natives of "Waiapu tales of a monstrous bird called moa, having the head of a man, that inhabited the mountain side some eighty miles away. This mighty bird was said to- be attended by two equally huge dragons, which kept guard while he slept, and on the approach of man wakened the moa, which immediately rushed upon the intruders and trampled them to death. None of the Maoris had ever seen one of the birds, but had seen and somewhat irreverently used for making parts of their fishing tackle bones of its extinct relatives, and these boftes they declared to be as large as those of an ox.

"About the same time another missionary, Rev. Richard Taylor, found si bone ascribed to the moa, and met with very similar traditions among the natives of a nearby district, only, as one foot of the rainbow moves away as we move a foot toward it, in this case the bird.was said to dwell in quite a different locality from that given by the natives of East Cape.

''While the Maoris were certain the moa still surviA r ed, and to doubt its existence was little short of a crime, no one had actually seen it,

and as time went on, and the bird still remained unseen by any explorer, hope became doitbt and doubt certainty, until it became a mooted question whether such a bird- had existed within the past ten centuries, to say nothing of having liven within the memory of man. The discovery of a few skeletons, preserved in exceptionally dry caves on the South Islands, which not only had .some of the bones, still united by the ligaments, but patches of skin clinging to them, and bearing numerous feathers of a chestnut colour tipped with white, put a different complexion on the matter. The feathers had been preserved for centuries Avithout any care whatever.

"From the skeletons found at least twenty species of moas were tiefined, ranging in size from those but little larger than a turkey to the giant dinnornis inaximus, up to fourteen feet high, when the neck is straightened. The ostrich, eight feet tall, may be used as a comparison. Some species of moas were wingless, and all species were flightless, the former being void even such vestiges of wings as are found in the cassowary or apteryx.

"But if nature deprived these birds of wings, ample amends were made in the matter of legs, those of somo species—the elephant-tooted moa, pachyornis elephantopus, for example—being so massively built as to cause ' ono to wonder what the bird used them for, although supposed to be employed for scratching up roots of ferns on which the moas are believed to have fed. If the blow of the foot of an ostrich can knock down a man, what must have been the kicking power of an ablebodied moa ? "The moas were confined to North and SoTith Islands, few being common to both. It is believed that the islands have been separated sufficiently long to enable the evolution of species common to. each. Although moas were mimerous when man made his appearance in that part of the world, the large deposits of their bones indicate that the birds were on their wane, and that natural causes had already reduced the feathered population. A glacial period is believed to have wrought their destruction.. In one great morass, abounding in springs, their bones occur in such enormous numbers, layer upon layer, that it is thought the birds sought the place where the flowing springs might afford their feet at least some respite from the biting cold, and there perished miserably by the thousands. "What nature began man finished, if we may believe the legends of the Maoris, of moa hunts and feasts. Another theory ascribes the extinction of the moas to an earlier race of Maoris, and that after the extinction of the birds cannibalism naturally followed." The aepyornis, a bird of equal height, supposed to be extinct in its native haunts of Madagascar, has an equal chance to be found still existent by some wandering explorer. Madagascar is almost as much of a continent as. other large islands, and not yet fully' explored. French history ascribes the discovery of this bird as still existing on the southern end of the island in 1658. Later skeletons and huge eggs were sent to Geoffroy, St. Hilaire, who named the bird aepyornis maximus, meaning the greatest lofty bird. The diameters of the eggs were nine and thirteen inches, equal to the contents of six ostrich eggs and 148 hen eggs, or 30,000 humming bird eggs! South America is still but partially explored, and a wandering Levey may yet find there a living phorbrhacos, an extinct gigantic bird, seven or eight feet high. Its huge head was twenty-three inches long and seven inches in depth, an inch or two longer and deeper than that of a horse. He had big sharp-clawed feet, neck the size of a horse, and a beak as- sharp and formidable as an ice pick. ,

A dinosaur could not havo more t,orn and mutilated its prey, which, in a Patagonian country, where bones of huge snakes exist, finds a natural answer. Phororahacos lived in miocene times, an era before man is snpposed to have existed, so we have no myths of natives chasing this giant for food or being chased l»v it.

The dodo, destroyed by sailors for food on the island of Mauritius, leaves living, for comparison, only the ostrich. Here is si bird which has an ancestry as old as any of them that man has neither been able to exterminate nor even diminish in numbers. On the contrary, it has increased under domestication.