CHAPTER XV. 
GIANT BIRDS. 
‘¢To discover order and intelligence in scenes of apparent wildness and 
confusion is the pleasing task of the geological inquirer.” —Dr. PArIs. 
Or all the monsters that ever lived on the face of the earth, the 
giant birds were perhaps the most grotesque. An emu or a 
cassowary of the present day looks sufficiently strange by the side 
of ordinary birds ; but ‘running birds” much larger than these 
flourished not so very long ago in New Zealand and Madagascar, 
and must at one time have inhabited areas now sunk below the 
ocean waves. 
The history of the discovery of these remarkable and truly 
gigantic birds in New Zealand, and the famous researches of 
Professor Owen, by which their structures have been made known, 
must now engage our attention. 
In the year 1839 Professor Owen exhibited, at a meeting of 
the Zoological Society, part of a thigh-bone, or femur, 6 inches in 
length, and 5% inches in its smallest circumference, with both 
extremities broken off. This bone of an unknown struthious 
bird was placed in his hands for examination, by Mr. Rule, with 
the statement that it was found in New Zealand, where the 
natives have a tradition that it belonged to a bird now extinct, 
to which they give the name Moa. Similar bones, it was said, 
were found buried on the banks of the rivers. 
A minute description of this bone was given by the professor, 
