24 
time for him to include it in the Appendix to the forthcoming 
volume of Roman Inscriptions in Britain. The absence of 
ligatures and the form of the letters refer it to the end of the 
second century, perhaps the reign of Commodus, 
October 1st. —Mr. Pumphrey, on behalf of Mr. T. Allis, 
F. S. L., the author, who was present, read a paper on the 
skeleton of the apteryx, which said :—Towards the end of last 
July, I received a note from my friend. Dr. Gibson, imforming 
me that he had received from New Zealand the body of an 
apteryx in spirits, and that he had left it at the Museum for me. 
I brought it home, and, to keep our house free from smell, I 
took it to the orchard-house to skin, which I found the most 
difficult thing of the kind I had ever encountered. I sent to 
the Museum for the transactions of the Zoological Society to see 
Professor Owen’s account of the bird. I there found his figure 
and description of the skin muscles, which explained the diffi¬ 
culty I had had in skinning the bird. The use of the muscles 
of the skin appears to he to enable the bird to shake from itself 
the dirt which must attach to the feathers from its burrowing 
and scratching in the earth. I found he had figured the sternum 
and scapulo-coracoid, with apertures through the hones. My 
skeleton had no such apertures. His figure again exhibited the 
caudal vertebrse between the ischium and the os pubis; in my 
skeleton the caudal vertebree were firmly anchylosed along the 
top of the sacrum, quite out of sight, and from the extremity of 
the sacrum descended a small tail composed of seven caudal 
vertebim. In Professor Owen’s figure the first pair of ribs con¬ 
sists of a slender bone, terminating in a point. In my specimen 
the same rib terminates abruptly, just below where a bony 
appendage branches off to gain support from the next rib. On 
the bird’s left side, the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th ribs are attached 
to the sternum bv sternal ribs; the 6th is attached to the 5th bv 
membrane, and all those have bony processes extending over 
the succeeding rib for support; the Tth, 8th, and 9th proceed 
from the sacrum, and have their ends fi-ee. On the right side 
the 2nd rib terminates in a point, and has no articular surface 
to which a sternal rib could have been attached. From the 
