Book Description

Excerpt from The Animals of New Zealand: An Account of the Dominion's Air-Breathing Vertebrates In this work we have endeavoured to combine popular information with the purely scientific, and have intermingled stories of quaint habits and characteristics with accurate descriptions of all the animals dealt with. Our object has been to publish a volume that will be useful to naturalists, and at the same time interesting to the general public. The first consideration has been accuracy; the second, sufficient information in small space. To attain this end, we have drawn largely on the works of others. Chief among these is the late Mr. T H. Potts. He knew our fauna before its destruction had been fairly begun, and he devoted stupendous energy to the study of the habits of our native birds. AS a result of his labour of love, New Zealand possesses unique records in its literature on natural history. The main part of his Observations is embodied in stray articles in the Christchurch newspapers, in the Transactions of the New Zealand Institute, and in a little book entitled Out in the Open. No work dealing adequately with the natural history of this colony would be complete without quotations from Mr. Potts 's writings; and as Mrs. Potts has kindly placed all his publications at our disposal, we have introduced into this volume some of the best of them. Where large and important collations have been made, we have indicated the source or the writer; but we have found it impracticable to do SO in regard to all quotations, as we have had to take a few lines here and a few there, and to weld them together in order to make a connected Whole. We have exercised much care in taking extracts. A portion of the popular part of the information was published as a series of copyright articles in The Lyttelton Times in 1903; but these have been revised and added to. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.