430 Proceedings. 
Himantopus, Botaurus, Haematopus, several species of ducks, and of a number 
of still smaller birds which cannot be distinguished from bones belonging to 
recent species. The remarkable fringed lizard, Hatteria punctata, was also an 
inhabitant of this island, as several bones belonging to it were found with the 
Moa bones. 
Professor Owen having described at some length, in several of his memoirs 
on Dinornis, the affinities our struthious birds bear to those of other 
countries, pointing out at the same time the peculiarities in which they 
vary from them, it would have been unnecessary for me to add anything to 
the subject had not an attempt been lately made by Professor Alphonse 
Milne-Edwards, in Paris, to show, from a comparison of the remains of the 
extinct ornithic fauna exhumed in Madagascar, Mauritius, and Rodriguez, 
that in some distant ages New Zealand formed a portion of a large continent, 
or of a group of more or less extensive islands in the Southern Hemisphere, 
which at one time were in some way connected with each other. He thinks 
that additional confirmation can be obtained from the ascertained occurrence of 
different Ocydromide, such as the Aphanapteryx and the Miserythrus leguati, 
which latter he informs me (letter to me, dated “Jardin des Plantes, Paris, 
Aug. 3, 1873”) bears close resemblance to our common woodhen (Ocydromus 
australis). 
However enticing the tracing of close affinities must be to the naturalist- 
philosopher, I believe that it would be rather rash to conclude the connection 
of two such distant insular groups from a few forms of birds only. Leaving 
the general question alone for the present, to which I shall return shortly, it is 
impossible for me to conceive that two countries, which in all other respects 
have such a dissimilar and distinctive flora and fauna, could have been united 
in any way without having left other living proofs of such connection in their 
present endemic organic life, not to speak of fossil remains. 
We know that Madagascar is a zoological sub-province of South Africa 
(Ethiopian region), but having a fauna so peculiar that it must, according 
to Sir Charles Lyell, have been separated from Africa probably since the 
upper miocene era. New Zealand, on the other hand, although it may have 
been formerly of larger extent, has never been more than an oceanic continental 
island from a zoological point of view, a theory first propounded by Darwin 
and Wallace, and with which I fully agree. It would be rather a difficult 
task to prove, upon such slender grounds as the presence of a few species of 
Struthious and Ralline birds will afford, that both countries could possibly 
have been connected. Moreover, the difference in the anatomical structure 
of the three Madagascar species of Æpyornis and of the New Zealand 
Dinornithidz— using this latter term in a general sense—is so enormous that 
I fail to see how they possibly could prove that connection in any way. 
