9190 Birds. 
I am sure, see that in printing opinions so opposed to each other as 
some of those which are here collected, it.is impossible for me to 
endorse the whole. To neither communication have I made the 
slightest addition; but I have eliminated from Mr. Rowley’s treatise 
a great deal that did not appear to me to be perfectly relevant or in 
any way essential to the right understanding of this most interesting 
subject. Mr. Rowley must now speak for himself. I ought to add 
that the short notice of my friend Mr. Allis’s paper on Dinornis 
robustus is penned by myself. 
EpWARD NEWMAN. 
The Egg of Apyornis maximus, the Colossal Bird of Madagascar. 
; By Grorce Dawson Row ey, M.A.* 
THREE different parts of the world appear to have possessed enor- 
mous tridactyle birds. North America points to the footprints of the 
Brontozoum giganteum in the sand stones of the Connecticut valley ; 
New Zealand boasts her fifteen or twenty species of Dinornis, of which 
the moa (Dinornis giganteus) is the largest, and Madagascar has lately 
revealed to us the [former] existence of the Apyornis maximus, The 
Brontozoum giganteum belongs to the triassic period of Geology, the 
vast antiquity of which, in some degree, weakens our interest. For the 
mind’s eye, retrospectively looking, takes dimly into its vision an object 
seen through countless ages of bygone time. The two island giants 
are well ascertained to have existed not very remotely, in fact in “ the 
Recent ;’? and come home to our imaginations in all their vivid reality, 
as things only of yesterday, or perhaps even [of] to-day, as is thought 
by some, though of this I never have had any very great hope. * * * 
There are three eggs of the Apyornis maximus extant, the largest 
and finest eggs in the world. Paris possesses two and some fragments, 
the one in my collection is the third. When I purchased this, I was 
assured that it exceeded in magnitude the two others, which | find, 
from a paper entitled ‘Compte Rendu des Séances de Académie des 
Sciences, No. 4, 27 Janvier, 1851, par M. Isidore Geoffroy Saint- 
Hilaire, tome xxxii. p. 101, to be the case. * * * 
Its dimensions. are as follows:—Shape an ellipse; major axis 
12} inches; minor axis 9§ inches; great circumference 34,5 inches ; 
* Reprinted in part from a pamphlet of sixteen pages, published by Triibner & Co., 
Paternoster Row. 1864. Price one shilling. 
