WELLINGTON PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY. 



FiBST Meeting : 12t]i June, 1889. 



A. de B. Brandon, President, in the chair. 



Neio Members. — E. Samnell, Eobert Eveuden, H. B. Vogel, 

 and F. W. L. Kirk. 



Inaugural address by the President, A. de B. Brandon, 

 B.A. 



Abstract. 

 Tlie President thanked the Society for the honour they had done 

 him in electing him to the office of President, and promised that he 

 would fulfil its duties to the best of his abilities. He referred feelingly 

 to the death of j\Ir. James Coutts-Crawford, F.G.S., one of the original 

 members of the Society, and to the great loss they sustained by the de- 

 cease of such an able and energetic working member as j\Ir. Crawford 

 had been. The Society on the 10th instant, he said, completed the 

 twenty-iirst year of its incorporation witli the New Zealand Institute ; 

 and he expressed a hope that as an adult it would continue to be as 

 progressive as it had been in its youth. Slembers would shortly be 

 asked to give their attention to the practical development of the scheme 

 recently proposed by J\Ir. Maskell, the success of whicli would of course 

 depend largely upon their exertions. Tiiere was, however, no reason to 

 .suppose that the result would not be in every way successful ; and 

 doubtless before long the medals of the Society would be regarded as 

 prizes to be eagerly sought after. Vol. xxi. of the " Transactions of the 

 New Zealand Institute" had just been published, and, as usual, the 

 subjects dealt with ranged over a very wide field. Having referred in 

 eulogistic terms to papers by Messrs. Maskell and Colenso, the President 

 said, — A short paper on the Apteajx bnllcrl comes from the jien of I\Ir. 

 R. Bowdler Sharpe, F.L.S., &c., in which he states that, during an 

 examination of some skins of Apterygcs in company with Sir Walter 

 BuUer, he became firmly convinced that the ordinary brown Aptcryx 

 of the North Island is certainly specifically distinct from the Apteryx 

 australis of the South Island ; and he was a little surprised to find, 

 on going over the literature of the subject, that, notwithstanding 

 a similar verdict on the part of such excellent naturalists as Sir 

 James Hector, Sir Julius von Haast, Professor Hutton, Mr. Potts, 

 and others, the North Island bird had not yet received a name. 

 The author then proceeds to say that it has generally been called 

 by naturalists A. mantelli, of Bartlett, and that it is the A. australis, 

 var. mantclU, of Finsch's paper in the "Journal fiir Ornithologie," 

 1873. He then asserts that the characters given by Mr. Bartlett for liis 

 A. mantelli are founded on the natural variations oi A. australis, "of 

 which A. mantelli is a pure synonym," and says that the North Island 

 Apteryx awaits a name. Having thus stated that a nameless bird has 

 been known by a name, but that this name belongs to another bird which 

 has another name, the author proceeds to discover that there are dif- 

 ferences between the nameless bird and the other bird, and, at the sug- 



