380 PROFESSOR OWEN ON THE GENUS DINORNIS. 
drawings of these fossils, has communicated a memoir on them to the Philosophical 
Institute of Canterbury, New Zealand, in which he refers the bird they represent to a 
genus Harpagornis, Haast, with the specific name moorei, after the partner of Ker- 
mode & Co., owners of the property, in which, through their liberality, so many 
evidences of the extinct birds of New Zealand have been brought to light. Harpa- 
gornis was twice the size of the great wedge-tailed eagle of Australia (Aquila audaa, 
Gould). The characters of the femur and the claw-bones, especially the length and 
shape of the “flexor process” in the latter, so far as the drawings permit the com- 
parison to be made, agree more closely with those of Circus than of Aquila. In this 
I concur with Dr. Haast, who was led to the same conclusion by comparing the bones 
of Harpagornis with those of the New-Zealand Harrier (Circus assimilis, Jardine). 
Dr. Haast conjectures that the gigantic Harrier preyed upon the young or feeble 
individuals of the genus Dinornis, and with them became extinct, He deduces from 
this discovery additional confirmation of his belief that “the present aborigines of New 
Zealand do not possess any traditions about the gigantic Moas”’, and writes, “ that if 
trustworthy traditions about the Dinornis had been handed down to us, the still more 
alarming existence of this gigantic bird of prey, contemporaneous with the former, 
would most certainly have been recorded.”—JLetter penes me, dated ‘“ Canterbury 
Museum, Christchurch, N. Z., 22nd December, 1871.” 
I may remark that the individual who, in 1839, submitted to me, with other New- 
Zealand rarities, the fragment of bone which gave the first evidence of great wingless 
birds in that island, stated that the natives from whom he obtained it “‘had a tradition 
that it belonged to a bird of the eagle kind, which had become extinct, and to which 
they gave the name of ‘ Movie.’”? Iam now, of course, disposed to attach more weight 
to this tradition than when it rested on a fossil proved to belong to a bird which could 
not fly, and which was as large as an Ostrich. We may suppose the great Raptorial 
species, which we now know to have coexisted with the Dinornithes, to have survived, 
by reason of its greater power of escape, some time after the extinction of its principal 
prey; and the tradition of the great bird “ of the eagle kind” may be a consequence of 
the knowledge of the Harpagornis continuing down to later generations of Maories 
than those who hunted down the huge herbivorous flightless birds. 
' Proceedings of the Zoological Society, 1870, p. 53, * Thid. 1839, p. 169. 
