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.