text:  How are we to explain them upon our author's hypothesis? Are we to make supposition upon supposition and presume that the land of New Zealand had not been long enough emerged from the sea to allow of the ample development of the original germ of life; and that if the rat had been left to himself he would in process of time have peopled the whole region with dogs and horses and oxen or some other analogous quadrupeds? But our readers have perhaps heard sufficient of an hypothesis which is built only on a series of conjectures and we ourselves are wearied with a too easy victory