212 
jaw is rounded and short, and impressed below by two parallel longitudinal grooves, sg. 
Each ramus is slightly bent in a sigmoid flexure, concave below at the anterior half, con- 
vex at the posterior one. ‘The alveolar border is pierced by vascular grooves and fora. 
mina at its anterior part, and obliquely levelled off to an edge behind. There is neither 
coronoid process nor vacuity in the ramus of the jaw, but only a deep longitudinal 
groove half an inch long, between the originally distinct ‘angular’ and ‘ surangular’ 
pieces, which groove is completely closed up on the inner side by the splenial piece: 
in this respect the present lower jaw differs from that portion of a very large one 
ascribed to the Dinornis in a preceding Memoir, p. 171, Pl. XLII. figs. 1 & 2. 
The principal articular cavity is the large and deep one that occupies the major part of 
the expansion at the articular end of the ramus: the second surface for the tympanic is a 
very narrow strip along the outer border of the expansion, which slightly overhangs that 
part of the ramus, The angle of the jawis obtuse. From the proportions of this lower 
jaw it appears that the ramus, as restored in fig. |. Pl. XLV., is about half an inch too 
long, and the whole beak of the Palapterya thus figured must be shortened to that extent. 
Humerus.—As the number of importations of the remains of the large wingless birds 
of New Zealand has progressively increased, the argument deduced from the absence 
of any bones of the anterior extremity in the first large collection transmitted by the 
Very Rev. Wm. Williams, has been gaining cumulative force, in proof of the extremely 
insignificant size of those bones. But, in the collection of remains last transmitted to 
me by Governor Grey, I found a fragment of a long bone, which I believe: to be the 
proximal half of the humerus. It is three inches and a quarter in length, with an en- 
larged oblong-ovate, convex articular end ; the shaft, at first three-sided, takes an oval 
transverse section as it recedes, diminishing from the head, and shows a slight ridge on 
one side, and a rough surface on the opposite for the attachment of small antagonizing 
muscles. The only other bone in the Dinornis with which it is comparable is the 
fibula; but, in the present specimen, the head is too convex, and has not the lateral 
concave articular surface which this fibula shows for the tibia. This small humerus 
may belong to a large species of Dinornis or Palapterya ; but to whatever sized species 
it did belong, it is as devoid of those muscular crests and tuberosities indicative of 
powers of flight, as the humerus of the Apterya is. 
A cranium of the Nofornis in the collection transmitted by Governor Grey exhibits the 
frontal portion which was deficient in the specimen described at p. 136 in a previous 
Memoir, in which that genus and its affinities were defined, 
The postfrontal processes equally divide the upper region of the skull from the super- 
occipital ridge to the naso-premaxillary groove: that region is moderately convex: the 
superorbital ridge is of about the same extent as the temporal ridge ; it is somewhat 
irregular, is grooved posteriorly, and terminates anteriorly in very short antorbital pro- 
cesses directed forwards. The coalesced frontals terminate anteriorly in a moderately 
thick straight transverse border of nine lines’ extent, overhanging the flat smooth plat- 


