Canterlury and Westhnd : 431 



implements, together with chipped ones, a fact proved beyond a doubt, 

 during my excavations in the Moa-bone Point Cave. However, this 

 does not lessen in any way the proofs of their age, because as previously 

 pointed out, well finished polished stone implements have been found 

 at the West Coast, in beds, the great age of which cannot be doubted. 



(B) The Di^oenithid^ oe Moa. 



This chapter would be incomplete were I not to offer a few observa- 

 tions on the DinomithidcB, the great extinct wingless birds of New 

 Zealand. It has been the good fortune of the Colony, that some, if 

 not the very first Moa bones discovered in New Zealand, were handed 

 over to Professor E,. Owen, F.R.S., the illustrious pupil and successor 

 of Cuvier, and from that date, November, 1839, or for nearly 40 years 

 that great comparative anatomist has continued his work on our extinct 

 Avifauna, on the ample material gradually furnished to him from the 

 Colony. The first description was given in the " Proceedings of the 

 Zoological Society of London," for November, 1839. Por several 

 years the material accumulated, so that Professor Owen in a paper 

 communicated November 28, 1843, to the same Society could already 

 describe six species, of which Dinornis giganteus was the largest, and 

 Dinornis otidiformis the smallest, all from specimens collected in the 

 Northern Island. In the course of the next 35 years, twenty more 

 papers on the same subject were published by him in the same Trans- 

 actions, now dealing however mostly with a number of species of the 

 DinomithidcB and a few other birds, belonging to some other orders, all 

 having been obtained in this (the South) Island. 



Mention must here, however, be made of an important paper 

 published in the " Annals and Magazine of Natural History " of August, 

 1844, written by the Eev. "W. Colenso, P.L.S, who as far back as 1838, 

 began to devote much attention to our extinct Avifauna. It bears the 

 title, " An account of some enormous fossil bones of an unknown 

 species of the class Aves, lately discovered in New Zealand." In this 

 interesting paper the writer gives some valuable information and 

 correctly places the fossil bones closely to Apteryx. 



