the change of climates. The applause was thunderous.
Mr. Dodge gracefully expressed his obligations to
his fair and friendly rival, Mr. Jones Harvey, who
had loaned his taxidermic appliances. It did
not appear to the public that the Mylodon could be
excelled in interest. The Toltec mummy, as he
could no longer talk, was flat on a falling market,
nor was Mr. Rustler’s narrative of its conversational
powers accepted by the scepticism of the populace,
though it was corroborated by Captain Funkal, Professor
Dodge, and Professor Wilkinson, who swore affidavits
before a notary, within the hearing of the multitude.
The Beathach, exhibited by Professor Potter, was
reckoned of high anatomical interest by scientific
characters, but it was not of American habitat, and
left the people relatively cold. On the other
hand, all the Macleans and Macdonnells of Canada and
Nova Scotia wept tears of joy at the corroboration
of their tribal legends, and the popularity of Professor
Potter rivalled even that of Mr. Ian Maclaren.
He was at once engaged by Major Pond for a series
of lectures. The adventures of Howard Fry, in
the taking of his gorilla, were reckoned interesting,
as were those of the captor of the Bunyip, but both
animals were now undeniably dead. The people
could not feed them with waffles and hominy cakes
in the gardens of the institute. The savants
wrangled on the anatomical differences and resemblances
of the Bunyip and the Beathach; still the critters
were, to the general mind, only stuffed specimens,
though unique. The African five-horned brutes
(though in quieter times they would have scored a
triumph) did not now appeal to the heart of the people.
At last came the day when, in the huge crowded amphitheatre,
with Te-iki-pa by his side, Jones Harvey addressed
the congregation. First he exhibited a skeleton
of a dinornis, a bird of about twenty-five feet in
height.
‘Now,’ he went on, ’thanks to the
assistance of a Maori gentleman, my friend the Tohunga
Te-iki-pa’—(cheers, Te-iki bows his
acknowledgments)—’I propose to exhibit
to you this.’
With a touch on the mechanism he unrolled the valves
of a gigantic incubator. Within, recumbent on
cotton wool, the almost frenzied spectators perceived
two monstrous eggs, like those of the Roc of Arabian
fable. Te-iki-pa now chanted a brief psalm in
his own language. One of the eggs rolled gently
in its place; then the other. A faint crackling
noise was heard, first from one, then from the other
egg. From each emerged the featherless head
of a fowl—the species hitherto unknown to
the American continent. The necks pushed forth,
then the shoulders, then both shells rolled away in
fragments, and the spectators gazed on two fledgling
Moas. Te-iki-pa, on inspection, pronounced them
to be cock and hen, and in healthy condition.
The breed, he said, could doubtless be acclimatised.
The professors of the museum, by Jones Harvey’s
request, then closely examined the chickens.
There could be no doubt of it, they unanimously asserted:
these specimens were living deinornithe (which for
scientific men, is not a bad shot at the dual of deinornis).
The American continent was now endowed, through the
enterprise of Mr. Jones Harvey, not only with living
specimens, but with a probable breed of a species hitherto
thought extinct.