The probable Locality of the Moa. 281 



have seen a large Notornis Mantelli. This bird is two feet 

 high, and such an animal was caught alive in 1850, — which 

 time and Meurant's fertile imagination may have magnified 

 into one of the largest of the feathered giants. I have asked 

 several men who knew Meurant, what they thought of his 

 statement about the Moa, and they all said that they could 

 not bring themselves to believe it. 



For my own part, I never saw or heard of a New Zea- 

 lander who had seen a large Moa, nor have I ever seen or 

 heard an account of a large Moa having been seen, which 

 carried the least evidence of truth on the face of it. That 

 the gigantic Moa is extinct, I have not the smallest doubt ; 

 but it is still probable that a few more living specimens of 

 the Notornis Mantelli may yet be found in the southern 

 parts of the middle island of New Zealand. This state- 

 ment is made with the perfect knowledge that Sir Everard 

 Home, R.N., when commanding Her Majesty's ship "North 

 Star," in the Pacific Ocean in 1844, stated that he felt little 

 doubt that a Moa (Dinornis) may still be found alive in the 

 middle island.* Since that period considerable portions of 

 the solitudes of the middle island have been explored by 

 Mr Thomas Brunner, and by officers of Her Majesty's sur- 

 veying ship Acheron, and by colonists from different settle- 

 ments in search of roads and grazing districts, but none of 

 these have seen the least trace of a living gigantic Moa. 



Is it probable that the Moa once lived on some of the Tro- 

 pical Polynesian Islands ? — In the Connecticut sandstones 

 of the Permian period, in North America, the footprints of 

 gigantic birds have been seen.f In 1850 the bones and 

 eggs of a gigantic bird were found in Madagascar, different 

 from the Dodo, but approaching, although differing from, 

 the Dinornis. \ Such discoveries suggest the question, 

 whether it is probable that Moas may have once lived on 

 some of the Polynesian islands scattered about in the Pacific 

 Ocean % The bones of the bird, it is true, have never been 



* Professor Owen on the Dinornis, Part II. 

 t Professor Hitchcock, Trans. American Academy of Arts, 1848. 

 1 See Translation of M. Geoffrey St Hilaire's Paper on some Bones and Eggs 

 of a gigantic Bird, from the Madagascar Annals of Nat. Hist, vol. vii. 1850. 



