210 
PROFESSOR OWEN 
CH. VII. 
which arrived to-day. Another is on the road. 
My father, before going on to the Royal Society, 
stayed to see it opened. We took out a pelvis, a 
few vertebrae — two enormous — and the femur of 
the gigantic bird.’ 
These bones were first sent to Dr. Buckland 
by ‘ a zealous and successful Church missionary 
long resident in New Zealand, the Rev. William 
Williams.’ This gentleman confirmed the tra- 
ditional statement of the natives of New Zealand, 
relative to the huge bones which they brought 
him from time to time, in regard to the class of 
animals to which they belonged.^ ‘ He has, 
therefore,’ Owen writes, ‘a just claim to share in 
the honour of the discovery of the dinornis, since, 
while collecting and comparing its osseous remains, 
he was wholly unaware that its more immediate 
affinities had already been determined in England.’ 
Mr. Williams, in a letter to Dr. Buckland in 1842, 
shows that he was not aware of the fact that 
Owen had received and described the fragment 
of the femur of the dinornis. ‘ By means of the 
specimens first transmitted by Mr. Williams to 
Dr. Buckland, and generously confided to me by 
that distinguished geologist,’ Owen continues, ‘ I 
was enabled to define the generic characters of 
the dinornis, as afforded by the bones of the 
hind extremity. By the favour of a like disposition 
of Mr. Williams’s second and richer collection of 
^ Extinct Wingless Birds of New Zealand, p. 76. 
