144 Transactions. — Zoology. 



Timaru and, " with little doubt," identified a " rough red 

 shingle," which he did not even see in sitii, with the gravels 

 of the "alluvial fans" of the Canterbury Plains. He also 

 identified the bone-bed itself, which lies above the " rough red 

 shingle " and below the lava-stream, with the silt or loess 

 which lies on the top of the lava-stream. Mr. Forbes's opinion 

 on the subject cannot therefore carry any weight ; it is merely 

 another instance of the mistake, so often made, of correlating 

 rocks by lithological resemblances, and overlooking the far 

 more important evidence to be derived from the changes 

 which took place between the deposition of the two beds. 



The moa-remains belong to a species {A. antiqiius) which 

 has not been found elsev^here, but if it had been correct that 

 bones of a li%dng species of kiwi occurred with them it would 

 have been strong evidence in favour of the bed being younger 

 than Miocene. A broken femur, only partially cleared from 

 the matrix in which it is imbedded, cannot furnish very con- 

 clusive evidence ; and Mr. Forbes gives no description of the 

 bone, neither does he say on what characters lie relies as 

 proving it to be the femur of Apteryx. Certainly his drawings 

 do not bear out his statement, for they show a bone differing 

 materially from the femur of Apteryx australis. The shaft is 

 too straight and too stout ; the head too convex ; the neck too 

 transverse to the axis of the bone, and far too much con- 

 stricted. At the distal end the inner condyle projects inward 

 too much, and the outer one too much downward, thus making 

 the articular surface too oblique to the shaft. In several 

 characters the drawings resemble the femur of Aptornis more 

 than that of Apteryx, and I cannot accept Mr. Forbes's draw- 

 ings, unaccompanied as they are by any description, as a proof 

 that the bone belongs to Ap)teryx at all, much less to A. aus- 

 tralis. The gravels under the bone-bed belong, no doubt, to 

 the series of sands and gravels which Mr. McKay has shown 

 to lie conformably on beds with marine Miocene fossils. 

 "Whether these gravels are Upper Miocene or older Pliocene it 

 is at present impossible to say ; but we may safely assume 

 that the lavas are much older than Pleistocene, because since 

 they were erupted the amount of denudation has been enor- 

 mous, and all traces of the place from whence they came have 

 been swept away. 



Lastly, the Hon. W. Mantell, in 1849, found in a septa- 

 rium near Hampden, Otago, a fragment of a large bone 1-J-in. 

 in diameter, which was said by high authorities in England 

 to belong to a bird."-' These septaria are, I think, of Lower 

 Miocene age, as they occur in sandy clays containing in the 

 close neighbourhood Aturia zic-zac, Ancillaria, Cominella, as 



* Quar. Jour, Geol. Soc, vol. vi., p. 326. 



