240 REPORT — 1844. 



with tlie state of animal life during the period of the Wealden formation*. 

 The only indiger.uus terrestrial Mammalian quadruped hitherto discovered 

 in New Zealand^is a small rat. The most peculiar representative of the 

 warm-blooded classes is the Apteryx. It is the smallest known species of the 

 Struthious or wingless order of Birds, has the feeblest rudiments of the an- 

 terior members, and not any of its bones were permeated by air-cells. This 

 bird forms the most striking and characteristic type of the Fauna of New 

 Zealand. 



The organic remains of the most recent deposits of the North Island, which 

 are most probably contemporary with the post-pliocene formations of Au- 

 stralia and Europe, are referable to an apparently extinct genus of Struthious 

 birds, having the nearest affinities in the dense structure and medullarj' cavi- 

 ties of the bones to the Apteryx. The remains of this genus (Dinornis) 

 appear to be very abundant, notwithstanding the stupendous stature of some 

 of the species ; since I communicated my notice of it to the Zoological So- 

 ciety in 1839, six extinct species have been well-established t? on the evidence 

 of abundant remains collected by the Rev. Mr. Williams, Mr. Colenso;}:, and 

 Mr. Cotton, at Poverty Bay, Wanganui and Wairoa. It is reported that a 

 species of Dinomis still exists in the South Island of New Zealand ; and it 

 is not improbable that some of the species may have been living when the 

 aborigines first set foot on the North Island. But the bones which have 

 reached me from the North Island, although retaining much of their animal 

 matter, are more or less impregnated with ferruginous salts, and may have 

 lain in an argillaceous soil for as long a period as some of the latest extinct 

 Mammals of Australia, South America and Europe. At all events, so far as 

 our knowledge of the living and the last-exterminated Fauna of the warm- 

 blooded animals of New Zealand extends, it shows that the same close ana- 

 logy existed between them, as it is the object of this Report to exemplify 

 in the larger natural divisions of the dry land on the present surface of this 

 planet. 



I am far however from assuming that our present observations are suffi- 

 ciently extensive to have established the law of the geographical distribution 

 of the Mammalia of the pliocene and post-pliocene periods ; to speak of the 

 sum of such observations under the term ' law' may, perhaps, be deemed pre- 

 mature. But the generalizations enunciated in the present Report appear to 

 be sufficiently extensive and unexceptionable to render them of importance in 

 a scientific consideration of the present distribution of the highest organized 

 and last-created class of animals ; and to show that, with extinct as with 

 existing Mammalia, particular forms were assigned to particular provinces, 

 and, what is still more interesting and suggestive, that the same forms tvere re- 

 stricted to the same provinces at a former geological period as they are at the 

 prese7it dag. 



I have purposely refrained from pursuing the comparison of recent and 

 extinct Mammalia, in reference to their local distribution, to the eocene 

 epoch : too little is known, or can reasonably be conjectured, as to the relative 

 distribution of sea and land on the surface of the globe at that remote ter- 

 tiary period, to elucidate the relations of geographical sites of continents to 

 particular groups of animals. 



* Elements of Geology, 8vo, 1838, p. 3G6, and Principles of Geology, 1837, vol. i. p. 204. 

 t Transactions of the Zoological Society, vol. iii. pp. 32 anil 235. 



X An interesting acconnt has heen published by tliis gentleman in the Tasmanian Journal 

 of Natural History, vol. ii. No. vii. 1843. 



