3 i8 NATURAL SCIENCE. Oct., 



have made were a few in the genera, owing to Mr. Lydekker having convinced me 

 that I had put too much reliance on Sir R. Owen's plates. 



The second point in Mr. Forbes's criticism to which I wish to refer relates to the 

 age of th ebeds in which Anomalopteryx antiqua was found. Mr. Forbes says (Nat. 

 Sci., vol. ii., p. 378), " I shall, however, most willingly admit that I am mistaken as 

 to the age of the strata in which these Dinornis remains have been found as being 

 other than " newer Pliocene, or even Pleistocene," so soon as the officers of the New 

 Zealand Geological Survey— who are really the only competent referees in the case — 

 shall have assigned to these gravels a different age." But it was the officers of the 

 Geological Survey whom Mr. Forbes contradicted. It was Sir Julius von Haast, 

 Provincial Geologist of Canterbury, who referred the Timaru lava stream, which 

 overlies the gravels, to the Eocene ; and it was Mr. A. McKay, Assistant Geologist 

 to the Geological Survey of New Zealand, who said that these beds are of Miocene 

 a<*e. All that I did in the matter was to point out that Mr. Forbes differed from the 

 officers of the Geological Survey without examining the evidence on which their 

 opinions were founded. 



Canterbury Museum, Christchurch, N.Z. F. W. Hutton. 



25 June, 1893. 



I have to thank the Editor for the perusal of the above observations of 

 Mr. Hutton. In regard to the date of the arrival in New Zealand of Mr. Lydekker's 

 " Catalogue of Fossil Birds in the British Museum," I beg to say that the date 

 entered in the Museum Additions Book does not necessarily indicate the exact date of 

 its receipt. As Mr. Hutton says that he came to me for the volume after the 

 reading of the first part of his paper, I leave the question there. I handed him Mr. 

 Lydekker's volume, however, immediately on its reaching my hands, within a day or 

 two of his asking me for it. At all events, the point I raised remains unaltered, that 

 as Mr. Hutton's paper could not be published for at least five or six months after it 

 was read, and since Lydekker's classification and the descriptions of his new species 

 were in Mr. Hutton's hands before he corrected his proofs, he ought not to have 

 added to the confusion already existing in the classification and synonymy of the 

 Dinornithidse. 



In regard to the second point, I quoted in my paper the latest opinion of the 

 Director of the Geological Survey, which I have now before me, and if I recollect 

 aright the opinion verbally expressed to me by Mr. A. McKay on the last occasion 

 on which he visited me at the Museum. 



Henry O. Forbes. 



On Anomalopteryx antiqua, Hutton, and other New Species of Moa from 

 Enfield, New Zealand. 



In the Transactions of the New Zealand Institute, vol. xxv. (1892), just received, Mr. 

 Hutton gives a further account of this species founded by him in the previous 

 volume on fragments of a tibia embedded in two blocks of laterite found near 

 Timaru, N.Z., and on two other fragments of a metatarsus he had seen in a photo- 

 graph, which he assumes to belong to the same species. The photograph is 

 reproduced on plate xvii. of volume xxiv. The species is founded on the tibial 

 fragments marked a and b ; and on those of the metatarsus lettered c and d. In 

 the same volume, page 125, he states the length of the latter to be " 55 ? inches," 

 and of the former to be " 12 inches." In the new volume he now, on plate iv., figures 

 the two metatarsal fragments from their casts made by me, which he had pre- 

 viously overlooked in the Christchurch Museum. The interest of the specimens 

 rests in their being the oldest — Newer Pliocene or Pleistocene — known portions of 

 Dinornis; but the value of Anomalopteryx antiqua as a species, and necessarily the 

 value of the deductions drawn from these fragments of bone, will be apparent when 

 I state that fragment b of the tibia was obtained at one time (the first find) and the 

 fragment a on a subsequent occasion (the third find), and that they came from 

 different "drives "made for blasting purposes, under distant parts of the dolerite 



