98 JOURNAL OF SCIENCE 



degree of affinity which under the circumstances could not have been 

 overstated, but, as stated, is quite sufficient to shew that Australia 

 was the nursery of the sept. 



But let us quit generalities for the more immediate object in hand, 

 viz., a brief review of the recorded occurrences of the Moa stock in 

 Australian deposits. As if to excite a hope that such occurrences 

 would be frequent, the first of all the extinct birds of Australia to be 

 drawn from those deposits and made known to science was a struthious 

 bird dwarfing in size not only existing Cassowaries and Emus, but the 

 Emu which was contemporary with it. A thighbone of this bird was 

 discovered in the year 1836 by Sir Thomas Mitchell in abrecchia cave 

 in Wellington Valley, New South Wales. It was examined by Sir 

 Richard Owen and figured by him in an appendix to Mitchell's 

 'Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia,' 1838. 

 At that time, as we are subsequently informed, Owen determined the 

 bone ' to belong to a large bird probably from its size struthious or 

 brevipennate, but not presenting in its femur characters which 

 justified him in suggesting closer affinities.' The study of Moa bones 

 in after years enabled him, he says, to perceive that in some features 

 of importance the cave femur 'resembles that bone in the Emu rather 

 than in Dinornis.' We learn further that 'the length of this fossil 

 was 13 inches, the breadth of the middle of the shaft not quite 3 

 inches' — measurements which are noteworthy, as they render it 

 apparent that in its dilated proportions the bone was much more like 

 the Dinornis femur than that of the Emu which has a breadth of 

 only 1^ inches to a length of 8| inches. 



Thirty-three years elapsed before any further light was thrown 

 upon a problem which was sufficiently obscure. It then issued from 

 the Peak Downs, near the centre of Queensland, where in 1869 a well 

 was being sunk. The workmen passed through thirty feet of the 

 residuum of basaltic decomposition, the ' black soil' characteristic of 

 'Downs' country, then through 150 feet of drift pebbles and boulders. 

 Lying on one of the boulders, at 180 feet from the surface, they met 

 with a short thick femur, which was happily preserved from the 

 usual fate experienced by such finds, and more happily, passed into 

 the hands of the well-known geologist, the Rev. W. B. Clarke. In 

 concert with Mr. G. Krefft, then Curator of the Australian Museum, 

 Mr. Clarke compared it with moa bones, with the result that he felt 

 himself justified in announcing the discovery in the Geological 

 Magazine of that year in a letter entitled ' Dinornis an Australian 

 genus.' At Sir R. Owen's solicitation a cast of this bone was sent to 

 him by the Trustees of the Australian Museum, and this, in 1872, 

 formed the subject of a communication from Owen to the Geogra- 

 phical Society (Trans., vol. 8, p. 381). After pointing out at length 

 the characters in which this femur resembles Dinornis and Dromteus 

 (Emu) respectively, the examiner decides "that in its essential 

 characters it resembles more that bone in the Emu than in the Moa, 

 and that the characters in which it more resembles Dinornis are 

 concomitant with and related to the more general strength and 

 robustness of the bone, from which we may infer that the species 

 manifested dinornithic strength and proportions of the hind limbs 

 combined with characters of closer affinity to the existing more 



