THE MOA AT HOME. 283 



Portions of dried skin and a few feathers of the Moa, as 

 already stated, have been found ; the colour of the barbs of tbe 

 feathers are chestnut-red, and the rounded portion of the tip 

 is white. These feathers, according to Captain Hutton, show 

 the bird to have been more nearly allied to the American 

 Rhea and Emu than to any of the struthious birds of the Old 

 World. 



Fragments of Moa eggs are quite numerous, particularly in 

 the kitchen-middens of the Moa-hunters, and a few nearly 

 or quite perfect specimens have been found. Dr. Hector 

 describes one 8"9X6"1 inches diameter, which contained the 

 remains of an embryonic chick. Another specimen measured 

 9'5 inches long. 



These are certainly monstrous eggs, and yet the fossil bird of 

 Madagascar (Epyornis), although a smaller bird than the great 

 Dinornis, laid a much larger egg, two specimens of which are in 

 the Jardin des Plantes, Paris, and measure respectively 13x9 and 

 12X10 inches in diameter. And yet, after all, neither of these 

 birds laid so large an egg, in comparison to its size, as does the 

 Apteryx of New Zealand at the present day. 



And now, as a fitting close to this brief summary, we quote from 

 Prof. Owen's paper on the Dinornis : — " The extraordinary number 

 of wingless birds, and the vast stature of some of the species 

 peculiar to New Zealand, and which have finally become extinct 

 in that small tract of dry land, suggest it to be the remnant of a 

 larger tract or continent over which this singular struthious fauna 

 formerly ranged. One might almost be disposed to regard New 

 Zealand as one end of a mighty wave of the unstable and ever- 

 shifting crust of the earth, of which the opposite end, after having 

 been long submerged, has again risen with its accumulated deposits 

 in North America, showing us in the Connecticut sandstones of 

 the Permian (Trias) period the footprints of the gigantic birds 

 which trod its surface before it sank ; and to surmise that the 

 intermediate body of the land-wave, along which the Dinornis 

 may have travelled to New Zealand, has progressively subsided, 

 and now lies beneath the Pacific Ocean." 



