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Show 56 iROF. OWEN ON THE EXTINCTION OF DINORNIS. [Jail. 27, which is in perfect condition, please to tell me, and I shall have it prepared as soon as possible. " Believe me, m y dear Professor Owen, " Your's most faithfully, "Prof. R. Owen, F.R.S., "JULIUS HAAST." British Museum, London." In perusing with much interest the foregoing letter, I jotted down a few notes that occurred to me, and send the following as an Appendix to Dr. Haast's remarks :- In the traditions of the Maories, handed down by tales and chaunts from father to son, collected and translated by Governor Sir George Grey, K.C.B., are some relating obviously to the Moa*. Through how' many generations such traditions had travelled there is no evidence. Neither does Dr. Haast communicate in the foregoing interesting letter the other alleged facts on which conviction could rest as to the indubitableness of the extinction of the species of Dinornis " many hundred years ago." If the " manner of their occurrence" relates to the depth " 6 or 8 inches of vegetable soil" covering the "cooking-places or ovens," that evidence is insufficient as to their date. The native oven and contiguous heap of bones discovered by Mr. Cormack in the North Island of N e w Zealand, in the bay Opito, on the east coast, were covered by a " stratum of sand " of 3 feet depthf. The " kitchen-midden" there was chiefly of remains of Dinornis, with bones of smaller birds and of fishes ; and, with reference to the former, it is significant of a knowledge of the " traditions," that Mr. Cormack's " native attendant remarked that they were the remains of the food cooked here at a former period and eaten by the then native inhabitants"!. The geological judgment, to which Mr. Cormack defers, as to the time required for the accumulation of 3 feet of drift-sand over a cooking-oven on a sand-cliff by the sea-shore would not be favourable to assigning to it a date of "several hundred years." Mr. Cormack does not notice any human remains or works in his " kitchen-midden ;" nor were any of the former in the collection of bones transmitted to me. Dr. Haast's negative evidence is the more valuable, since remains of the human skeleton were evidently sought for, and would have been recognized by so accomplished a naturalist and anatomist. I conclude, therefore, whatever may be the date of these Moa feasts, that the moderate or middle-sized species of these large birds were then in numbers sufficient to stave off that fell famine which at or near the epoch of their extinction drove the Maories to cannibalism. But upon this point, and in the absence of the more gigantic species oi Dinornis from the "ovens" and "middens" discovered by Dr. Haast, I may refer to the concluding paragraph of my first memoir " on Dinornis" (Trans. Zool. Soc. vol. iii. p. 270). * See Sir George Grey's remarks, below, p. 116.-En. + '* On Dinornis" Part YI. (Trans. Zool. Soc. vol. iv. p. 146). \ Ib. p. 146. |