r, BIRDS OF NEW ZEALAND. 



The discovery of a fresh and very distinct species in 1870 (thirty-seven 

 years after the first Apteryx austraUs, Shaw, stood in Lord Derby's Museum) 

 was a thing I, in common wdth others, did not believe. " Dies diem docet," 

 says Cuvier. I instructed the person who undertook, on my behalf, to make 

 a search for A. maxima, to hunt diUgently for A. haastii as well. After more 

 than two years a tin case arrived, containing, among other things, four fine 

 skins, the adult male and female, and the young male and female. These I 

 took to the Meeting of the Zoological Society in Hanover Square, together 

 with the male and female Sceloglaux alhifacies, the rarest of the two endemic 

 forms of New-Zealand Owls, being the only examples of the latter ever 

 brought alive to England. Apteryx haastii (named by Mr. T. H. Potts after 

 Dr. Julius Haast) is due to the zeal of the former gentleman, whose account, 

 extracted from the ' Transactions of the New-Zealand Institute,' vol. iv. 1871, 

 art. xxxiii. p. 204, is as follows : — 



" In the collection of the Canterbury Museum the Apterygidae are 

 well represented, more especially in the species which are peculiar to the 

 Middle Island. Some time last summer, amongst a consignment of skins 

 received from Westland was a specimen of a large Apteryx, which presented 

 such peculiarities that it was considered to be a new species by the writer, 

 and named Apteryx haastii, in compliment to Dr. Haast. From a note by the 

 collector it appears to have been obtained on the high ranges. Subsequently 

 a second specimen was procured, the precise locality not given, but probably 

 from the ranges above Okarita. The first specimen (no. 1), which we take 

 to be that of an adult female, may be described thus : — Face, head, and neck 

 dull brown, darkest in a line from the gape to, and immediately behind, the 

 ear, and on the nape ; upper surface indistinctly barred with blackish brown 

 and rich fulvous, each feather crossed with marks of dark brown and fulvous, 

 approaching to chestnut on the apical bars ; chin greyish brown ; throat dull 

 brown, indistinctly marked with fulvous ; breast and abdomen dull brown, 

 barred with pale fulvous ; straggling hairs about the base of the bill black, 

 some produced to the extent of 3-5 inches ; bill yellowish ivory, measuring 



