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 I'efers the bird they represent to a 

 genus Harpayornis, Haast, with the specific name moorei, after the partner of Ker- 

 mode & Co., owners of the property, in which, through their liberality, so many 

 endences 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 audax, 

 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 assiniilis, Jardine). 

 Dr. Haast conjectures that the gigantic Harrier preyed upon the young or feeble 

 individuals of the genus Biuornis, 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 Dinomis 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." — Letter 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.' "' I am 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 fiy, and which was as large as an Ostrich. We may suppose the great Raptorial 

 species, which v,e now know to have coexisted with the Dinomithes, 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. ' Ibid. 1839, p. 169. 



