ON THE EXTINCT ANIMALS OF THE COLONIES OF GREAT BRITAIN. 261 
Aptornis. All the others belonged to the genus Dinornis. 
Correspondence was kept up with every contributor in New 
Zealand of specimens and of information bearing upon this 
new chapter in Ornithology. Year by year accessions of fossils 
reached me ; all were of the class of Birds. 
No evidence of an extinct mammal or of an extinct reptile 
has hitherto been obtained from the comparatively recent for- 
mation yielding the avian remains. The progress of restoration 
was in two directions, one in perfecting a knowledge of the 
entire skeleton of an individual, the other of the specific and 
generic modifications of these extinct wingless birds. The law 
of correlation, justifying the affirmation from the first fragment 
that the bird was terrestrial, incapable of flight, proportionately 
heavier and more sluggish than the ostrich, was vindicated by 
the discovery of the small and keel-less breast-bone, and by 
the relatively still smaller scapular arch, which, moreover, in- 
dicated an entire want of wings by the presence of a ridge 
where the socket for the main wing-bone should have been, and 
where it exists in the ostrich, and also in the apteryx, in which 
the wing is reduced to the smallest relative dimensions among 
existing birds. If any still smaller rudiments of a humerus 
should have existed, and have been suspended by ligament 
to the scapulo-coracoid arch, in Dinornis , such specimen has 
not yet reached me. Means of restoring the skull, the pelvis, 
the vertebral column, and the entire foot successively arrived. 
The next and very remarkable kind of Dinornis was cha- 
racterized by the relative thickness of the bones of the hind 
limb, and suggested the epithet elephant opus. This elephant- 
footed bird was as tall as an ostrich, but must have outweighed 
two, at least, of that largest of living birds — the “ Avium 
maxima ” of Linnseus. But I was favoured next to receive 
remains of a Dinornis which as much surpassed in size the 
giganteus as did this the ingens. Deeming then, as now, 
that the limits of bulk were surely reached, I committed my- 
self to the nomen specificum of Dinornis maximus. Of this 
stupendous bird you may see the skeleton in the British Museum. 
I thought the articulated casts of that of the Megatherium 
giganteum a suitable equivalent, in which the accomplished 
founder of the Natural History Museum at Christchurch, 
Canterbury Province, South Island, concurred. Dr. Von Haast 
has had the same pleasure in adding that evidence of one of 
the hugest extinct mammals to his museum at the Antipodes 
as I have experienced in the addition, due to his discovery in 
the Grlenmark swamp of the maximised Moa, of the skeleton of 
that bird in our National Museum at home. 
The species of Dinornis now more or less completely restored 
are fifteen in number : viz., struthioides , ingens , giganteus , 
