APPENDIX : NO. XLII. 63 
the disadvantageous circumstances under which I have generally 
seen it. In none of the paces is there anything approaching to a 
strut or a play of the head and neck, or any of the more elegant 
modifications of terrestrial locomotion observable in other birds: on 
the other hand there is no waddle, and nothing like a series of hops. 
Tail there is none to jerk or spread ; the wings are invisible, and the 
feathers I have never seen to be raised or lowered to give expression, 
unless perhaps those of the neck. The principal variety is in the 
relative position of head, neck, and body. The bird can run in 
the most elongated upright posture, and generally does so when 
disturbed ; but the more contracted mode of carrying himself, with 
head. below the level of the top of the rounded back, is adopted for 
ordinary progression. 
All the time I was watching him he uttered no ery, nor have I or 
the keepers heard him make any sound, except the growl, which it 
would be too great a compliment to designate a war-cry. He did not 
use his feet to scratch up or scrape the soil, and as he has never done so, 
so far as I have heard, there appears little likelihood in the account 
that he burrows in the ground in his native country—his long beak 
would probably be in the way were he to attempt to do so. As it 
has, I believe, elsewhere been suggested, his habits are probably in 
many respects like those of the Hedgehog, of which animal he has 
often put me in mind, and, like it, he may make his lair in corners 
in a good thick cover, such as the fern-thickets of New Zealand 
afford. 
With respect to his food; various kinds of insects have been found 
in the stomachs of those which have been dissected, and our bird has 
been known to eat grubs, very young mice, pieces of meat, and worms, 
being especially fond of lob-worms. His mode of piercing the ground 
seems to be too zealously practised not to be a constant habit, and it 
is probably amongst decayed leaves and vegetable matter that the 
Apteryx principally obtains its food. Mr. Yarrell describes a valve 
in the A. australis which would be pressed against and cover the 
nostrils in the operation; but Mr. Owen speaks only of the form of 
the bones as affording some protection in A. Mantelli*. It is at all 
* Dr. Mantell remarks, in speaking of the “common species” of Apteryx, having 
just before mentioned the three species, that “ the nasal apertures are in the base 
of the beak ; * * by a strange mistake the nostrils are stated by authors to be at 
the extremity ot the beak.”— (Fossils of Brit. Mus., Oct., 1851, p. 107). Mr. Yarrell 
had described the nostrils as opening at the end of the beak in Lord Derby’s 
original specimen of A. australis. Mr. Owen, after a careful dissection of what is 
now called A. Mantedli, had described them similarly in this bird; and,if my memory 
serves me, Mr. Gould had given no hint of any other mode of formation in_A, Owenzz. 
Dr. Mantell’s more recent assertion must not lightly be passed over; and I see that 
in a specimen of the true A. australis in the British Museum, there is, in addition 
to the openings near the tip of the beak, an appearance of two tubes between the 
cere and the bise of the beak, such as is not observable in A. Mantell’, which 
however is the “common species.” I have not yet examined this curious though 
perhaps fallacious structure. M>. Bartlett in the paper read before the Zoological 
Society [Proc. Zool. Soc. 1850, pp. 249-251], in which he established the two 
species, and spoke among others of Dr, Mantell’s specimen of A. australis, made no 
allusion to any difference in the nostrils. 
