244 Transactions. — Zoology. 



the hind toe, appear to be much blunted by use. The colours of the 

 plumage generally are brighter than in the supposed female specimen in 

 the British Museum, but they are, I think, less brilliant on the whole than 

 in the British Museum male : notably there is an entire absence of the 

 well defined terminal margins of verditer green on the wing-coverts which 

 form crescentic bands in the type specimen. There are, however, as 

 mentioned above, different blending shades of green and blue on the plumage 

 of the wings, which impart to it a very beautiful appearance. My recollec- 

 tion of the ? specimen in the British Museum collection is that it has these 

 crescentic markings far less conspicuous than in the male. 



Note. — There appears to have been originally very little colour in the 

 beak except on and below the fi-ontal shield and along the basal edges of 

 both mandibles. The legs are in much the same condition as that presented 

 by the legs in a dried Pukeko skin, the colours having faded out. But there 

 is enough colour left in the tarsi to show that the legs and feet were origin- 

 ally, as described above, a light (probably pinkish) red. The skin is much 

 stretched by unskilful treatment after being removed from the body ; but I 

 have allowed for the stretching in taking the measurements given above. 



I remarked to Professor Parker, on first taking up the specimen, that 

 the legs appeared to be more attenuated than in the British Museum 

 examples, and the measurements which I afterwards made, as given above, 

 prove that the toes are somewhat longer proportionately to the size of the 

 bird, which is altogether slightly larger than the type specimen described in 

 my "Birds of New Zealand." The frontal shield is, however, somewhat 

 smaller, being just one inch across in its widest part, and ascending barely 

 half an inch from the base of the culmen. It has a corrugated, shrivelled 

 appearance in the dried specimen, and from the sides of the bill, at its base, 

 the cuticle is inclined to peel off. The skin (in the dried state) is very 

 tough, having the appearance and consistency of fine leather. 



Hab. — South-west portion of South Island. As already mentioned the 

 first recorded specimen (in 1849) was obtained on Kesolution Island, the 

 second, nearly three years later, on Secretary Island, in Thompson Sound, 

 and the third, which has formed the subject of this paper (in December, 

 1879), on the eastern side of Te Anau Lake. Taking these three localities 

 as marking the points of a triangle describing the ascertained limits of its 

 occurrence, we have before us the present range of Notornis over a consider- 

 able area of very broken and rugged country. As its fossil remains testify, 

 its ancient range was far more extensive, including the North Island, and 

 in prehistoric times probably reaching much further. 



