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Show 1882.] PROF. OWEN ON THE STERNUM "OF NOTORNIS. 695 Notornis is extinct in the North Island, but it still lingers, as have seen, in the South Island of New Zealand. A perfect skeleton of the Norfolk-Island " Redbill " might show modifications, with claims to specific distinction from N. mantelli, like those which have been founded on the osseous remains of the extinct Moas of both North and South Islands of New Zealand. Hitherto I have not received remains of the genus Dinornis from any of the outlying tracts of land which may be conceived to have once formed, with the two New-Zealand islands, parts of a southern continent. Apteryx, like Ocydromus, is still represented by existing species in both North and South Islands. Considering the restricted powers of locomotion of the several genera above cited, it may be inferred that the lands yielding examples of such flightless birds were not, in their primitive days, separated by such breadths of ocean as that which divides the South Island from Lord Howe's Island, or as that known as " Cook's Straits." W e may conceive the lapse of time since the geological forces occasioned such divisions of a southern continent to have been so considerable as to have allowed the conditions originating technical species to have led to the modifications which distinguish the Northern from the Southern Moas, Kivis, and Wekas, and the Southern Notornis from that which inhabited tbe land of Norfolk Island. Lamarck's hypothesis of the way of work of the secondary evolutional cause of Species, by the influence, viz., of circumstances exciting or checking the exercise of parts, is more intelligible, more applicable in connexion wih observed facts, to the before-cited ornithic cases than is Darwin's or Wallace's 'Natural Selection.' Passing from the origin to the extinction of species, I may remark that the accomplished naturalist and ornithologist Professor Emile Blanchard, referring to the abundance of remains of Dinornis in the South Island of New Zealand, writes:-" Aussi est-il difficile de croire que la destruction totale de ces remarquables creatures ait ete accomplie par les Maories toujours clairsemes sur le littoral de l'He du Sud. Selon certaine probability, les evenements physiques ont ete la cause premiere de cette destruction;" and he infers that " L'extinction de ces oiseaux gigantesques serait une nouvelle preuve de l'effondrement du continent austral" l. But it is not easy to conceive that birds commanding, like the Moas, great powers of traversing dry land, would permit themselves to be submerged, for example, with the sinking proportion of their continent which has separated the North from the South Island of New Zealand. The Maories may have decreased in numbers in the portion so severed which was less favoured by climate and fertility. But this would be likely to quicken their quest and improve their ways of capture and slaughter of their great feathered flightless game. The discovery in the grave of the ancient chief, interred at " Kai Koras" in the South Island, of the egg of Dinornis ingens on his lap 2, placed there, probably, for sustenance during his journey to the "next world," testifies, with the scorched bones and fragments 1 0. E,. Acad. Sc. 1882, p. 392. 2 Memoirs on the Great Wingless Birds of New Zealand &c. p. 318, pl. cxvii. |
