﻿Prof. Hitchcock on Fossil Footmarks, Lincolnite, fyc. 61 



Art. VT. — Extract of a Letter from Prof. E. Hitchcock 



Fossil Footmarks, the Lin- 



o 



i^c, and a Lette? % from Prof 

 it Birds 1 Nests of New Holla: 



TO THE EDITORS. 



Since you have published in your Journal (he account by Cook 

 and Flinders, of the great bird nests found by them in New Hol- 

 land, it strikes me that your readers will be glad to see the opin- 

 ion of one so eminently qualified to judge concerning them as 

 Prof. Owen. I therefore copy the following letter from him on 

 the subject, lately received; and not the less willingly, because 

 his opinion is adverse to the suggestions which I made, (I cannot 

 say adverse to my opinion, since I had not made up my belief 

 fully.) that they might be the nest of the Dinoruis; for truth 

 should be the grand object in view, rather than support to one's 



own notions. 



College of Surgeons, London, August 30, 1844. 



Dear Sir — I beg to acknowledge your friendly letter of the 

 23d of July, which has just reached me. I have long been aware 

 of the notice of the large birds 5 nests, by Cook and Flinders. 

 Sir Robert Inglis was kind enough to write out an account of 

 them for me, soon after my first suspicions of a bird of extraor- 

 dinary stature in New Zealand, had been excited by the fragment 

 of bone, which I afterwards described in the Zoological Trans- 

 actions, in 1839. Independently, however, of the different local- 

 ity of the nests, Mr. Gould's interesting description, in the 

 " Birds of Australia," of the enormous ones built in common, by 

 the Dalagella or brush turkey of Australia, and by the Megapo- 

 dins } warns us of the danger of inferring too absolutely, the size 

 of a bird from that of its nest. 



Nests constructed as Cook and Flinders describe, cannot resist 

 the action of the elements many years, unless annually repaired. 

 It would be a very extreme hypothesis, to suppose the nests, seen 

 by the circumnavigators, to have been the enduring evidence of 

 extinct species ; but say that they were of comparatively recent 

 construction, and the work of existing species, if such species 

 were terrestrial, brevipennate birds, of a bulk proportioned to the 



