‘Next time he write that man live top side North Pole.’
I suppose John meant that he entered into communication with the Esquimaux.
‘“You sendee two piecee polar bear, and one piecee iceberg, you can catchee all same Egypt man.”’
Of course the Esquimaux were delighted. Next, John told us he wrote to the British Government.
‘“I wantee five piecee steamer, four piecee outside walkee can see, and another piecee inside walkee no can see; I pay you plenty moa bones.’”
And according to our friend he went on swapping moa bones all over the universe, obtaining in exchange Turner’s masterpieces, button-hooks, anchors, relics from ancient Rome, specimens of small volcanoes, pumpkins, and, in short, almost everything you see in the Museum. These the talented and energetic director has classified and reduced to the orderly system in which they are now presented to the visitor.
Although Christchurch has been a centre from which moa bones have been distributed throughout the world, the best collection of them has remained in their old habitat. There were big moas and little moas, and each of them had a different name. The first bit of moa that went home was a thigh-bone. The uninitiated would have pronounced it as belonging to an elephant. Professor Owen, however, said it was the relic of a gigantic bird. People smiled; now the Professor smiles.
The biggest moa had a neck like a giraffe. When he straightened and stood on his toes, he might have picked a weather cock off the top of a church spire. Naturalists say that the moa could not fly, but an old Maori, who I think was a king, told me that they could fly beautifully. Sometimes you could flush a dozen in a morning, and the shooting was grand. When they dropped they shook the ground like an earthquake. The best were roasted. I quite believed the latter statement, as their singed bones could be seen by the basketful in every museum we went to. They were pretty tough, and strangers, after once partaking of the delicacy, often refused to take any ‘moa.’ Thus the name of the animal.
Mac had not a soul for the anatomy of an extinct animal, and said it was dry.
This took us from the Museum to an hotel, where we found a bar supplied by an overflowing artesian well. Many of the people in Canterbury get their water from artesian wells. A hole is bored, and up shoots the water. Geologists say that this is due to hydraulic pressure communicated from the hills through inclined strata. These theories may be true where inclined strata exist, but it does not explain the coming up of water, when the strata are horizoned by flat river plains, which is the case in many parts of the world. The artesian-well theory wants considerable amplification in our mind.