INTRODUCTION. 



The organic remains of the most recent deposits of the 

 North Island, which are most probably contemporary 

 with the post-pliocene formations of Australia and Eu- 

 rope, are referable to an apparently extinct genus of 

 Struthious birds, having the nearest affinities to the Ap- 

 teryx. The remains of this genus (Dinornis) appear to 

 be very abundant, notwithstanding the stupendous stature 

 of some of the species.* It is reported that a large 

 Dinornis still exists in the South Island of New Zealand ; 

 and some of the species may have been living in the 

 North Island, when the human aborigines first set foot 

 there. But the bones which have reached me from that 

 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 Aus- 

 tralia, South America and Europe. Not a trace of 

 a fossil quadruped has been found in New Zealand ; 

 but our present knowledge of the living and the last- 

 exterminated Fauna? of the warm-blooded animals of that 

 small but far distant and isolated portion of earth, shows 

 that the same close analogy existed between them, as has 

 been exemplified in the corresponding Faunae of larger 

 natural divisions of the dry land on the present surface of 

 this planet. 



Additional facts, and the means of extending our com- 

 parisons, by the collection of the fossils of distant lands, are 

 most desirable in order to precisely define the laws of the 

 geographical distribution of the Mammalia of the older 



* I estimate the Dinornis ingens to have stood nine feet, and the Din. 

 giganteus ten feet, in height. See Zoological Transactions, vol. iii. part 3 ; in 

 which, also, the peculiar and suggestive geographical distribution of other existing 

 and extinct Struthious birds is discussed, p. 268, et seq. 



