ANCIENT BIRDS 223 



giant birds were perhaps the most grotesque. An emu or a 

 cassowary of the present day looks sufficiently strange by the side 

 or 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 5i 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 Dhe professor, 

 who pointed out the peculiar interest of this discovery on account 

 of the remarkable character of the existing fauna of New Zealand, 

 which still includes one of the most extraordinary birds of the 

 struthious order ("running birds"), viz. the Apteryx, and also 

 because of the close analogy which the event indicated by the 

 present relic offers to the extinction of the Dodo in the island of 

 Mauritius. On the strength of this one fragment he ventured to 

 assert that there once lived in New Zealand a bird as large as the 

 ostrich, and of the same order. This conclusion, which some 

 naturalists strongly opposed at the time, was more than con- 

 firmed by subsequent discoveries, which he anticipated ; and, 



