646 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



found, together with portions of the skin and a few feathers ; aUhough Dr. Haast. 

 claims that the conditions were exceptionally favorable for their long preservation, 

 others contend that they cannot be very many years old. 



Capt. Hatton thought that the weight of evidence goes to show that the re- 

 mains from the Earnsclugh cave "are not very old, and that probably they do 

 not date further back than the commencement of the present century," but in 

 speaking of the bones with dried skin from the Knobby Ranges, found more re- 

 cently (1874) in a crevice among the rocks, he says: "The extraordinary juxta- 

 position of decayed and lichen-covered bones with well preserved skin and flesh 

 seems to me to point to some peculiarity in the atmosphere which enabled flesh 

 to resist decay when shaded from the rays of the Sun, and by no means to prove 

 that the bird to which this neck and flesh belonged lived at a later date than 

 those whose bones we now find buried under the soil." 



D. W. Murrison thitiks that if what Dr. Haast and Mr. Colenso say is true 

 for the North Island, it certainly cannot be made to apply to the South Island, 

 and says, " I think from the evidence we are in possession of, there is every 

 reason to suppose that the Dinornis has existed within the last hundred years." 

 And thus the discussion is kept up as to the time when the Moa became extinct. 



As a sample of the traditions which Mr. Colenso explains away, we quote 

 from "Mr. J. W. Hamilton (Trans. N. Z. Inst., 1874): "In 1844, at Wellington, 

 I was present, as Governor Fitzroy's private secretary, at a conversation held 

 with a very old Maori, who asserted that he had seen Capt. Cook. This Maori, 

 so far as my memory now serves me, I should guess was seventy years old, at 

 all events he was brought forward as the oldest of his people then residing about 

 Port Nicholson. Being asked had he ever seen a Moa, he replied, ' Yes, he had 

 seen the last one that had been heard of,' and on being questioned described it 

 as a very large bird with a neck like that of a horse." Mr. H. further says : 

 " In 1844, and for many years later, it wasbeUeved by our people for a certainty 

 that the Moa was still to be found alive in the South Island, of which very little 

 was then known," and that stories were currently reported of one or two old 

 settlers in the south about Otago and Foveaux Straits who had actually eaten 

 Moa flesh. 



For the details of the osteology of these birds we must refer our readers to 

 Prof. Richard Owen's description pubUshed in the Transactions of the Zoological 

 Society of London, begun in November, 1839. Prof. Owen at first made two 

 genera, Dinornis and Falapteryx, but afterward discarded the latter genus and re- 

 ferred all the different species to the genus Dinornis. 



In 1875, Dr. Haast, Director of the Canterbury Museum, proposed two 

 families, with two genera in each family, thus : Family Dinornithidtz : (a) genus 

 Dinornis ; (b) genus Meionornis, and family Palapterygida : (a) genus Falapteryx ; 

 (b) genus Euryapteryx. 



Under these four genera, as proposed by Dr. Haast, there have been about 

 twenty species described. These species are founded mainly on the size and 

 proportion of the bones — particularly the bones of the leg, and it is not improba- 



