1848.] MANTELL ON FOSSIL REMAINS FROM NEW ZEALAND. 227 
this interesting subject ; but until 1846, when he resigned an official 
situation, he was unable to follow up his mquiries with success. In 
the meanwhile the collections of the Rev. W. Williams, Mr. Percy 
Earl, and of other gentlemen, had furnished the materials from which 
Professor Owen drew up his two celebrated memoirs on the Dinornis, 
an extinct genus of tridactyle Struthious Birds, which were pub- 
lished in the third volume of the Transactions of the Zoological So- 
ciety. 
in 1846, and the commencement of 1847, my son explored every 
known locality of these relics in the North Island within his reach, 
and went into the interior of the country and located with the natives, 
for the purpose of collecting specimens of the then unknown parts of 
the skeletons, and of ascertaining whether any of these gigantic birds 
were still in existence; resolving, if there appeared to be even a re- 
mote chance of this being the case, to penetrate farther into the 
interior and obtain one alive. The information he gathered’ from 
the natives offered no encouragement to follow up the pursuit, at 
least in that part of the country, but tended to confirm the idea that 
the gigantic struthious birds had become extinct, the last of the race 
having, like the Dodo, been destroyed by man within a comparatively 
recent period ; and that if any of the species whose bones are found 
in a fossil state are still living, it is probable they will be those of 
small size, and related to the Apteryz, the living diminutive repre- 
sentative of the colossal bipeds that once trod the soil of New Zea- 
land. 
With these introductory remarks, which appeared to me necessary 
to place the history of the discovery in a clear point of view, I pro- 
pose, first, to notice the geological conditions under which these 
fossil bones appear to have been accumulated ; secondly, to describe in 
general terms the most remarkable features of the collection before 
us ; and lastly, to offer some observations on the bearing of these facts 
on that difficult problem, that ‘‘ mystery of mysteries,’ as it has 
been emphatically termed by Sir John Herschel, the appearance and 
extinction of certam types of organic beings on the surface of the 
lobe.. 
i I. Geological position of the deposits in which the bones occur.—In 
attempting to arrive at a correct knowledge of the relative geological 
age of the deposit in which the bones sent to this country were found 
imbedded, I have experienced considerable difficulty, in consequence 
of the unsettled state of the orthography of the various localities, 
and also from the indefinite manner in which the collectors describe 
the places whence they obtamed the specimens. Unfortunately the 
letter from my son containing details of this nature, and to which 
in his subsequent correspondence he refers me for the necessary 
information, has not reached me. I endeavoured to mark on a map 
of New Zealand all the localities whence bones had been obtained, 
but several places mentioned by the collectors are not inserted. I 
will therefore briefly state the circumstances under which the bones 
are described as occurring by the gentlemen who have transmitted 
them to this country. 
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