Referring the reader to the additional account of the fossil birds of New Zealand given in a subsequent part of this volume (see _Supplementary Notes_, p. 173), I will conclude this notice with a few general remarks. From the numerous facts relating to the fossil remains of birds from our Antipodean colony, that have now been brought under the consideration of the naturalists and geologists of this country, we may safely conclude, that at a period geologically recent, but of immense antiquity in relation to the human inhabitants of those Islands, New Zealand was densely peopled by tribes of colossal struthious bipeds, of species and genera that have long since become extinct. I believe that ages ere the advent of the Maori tribes, the Moa and its kindred were the chief inhabitants of the country, and that from the period when those Islands were taken possession of by man, the race gradually diminished, and the colossal types were finally annihilated by human agency. That some of the largest species were contemporary with the Maories, there can now be no reasonable doubt. Apart from native traditions, and songs and tales in which allusions are made to the gigantic magnitude and flowing plumage of the Moa, the collocation of calcined and half roasted bones of the Dinornis, of dogs, and of the human species, in the ancient fire-heaps of the aborigines, and the unequivocal marks of the celt or axe of jade on some of the tibiæ,--the chips or cuts having evidently been made on the bones when recent,--afford incontrovertible proof that the last of the Moas, like the last of the Dodos, was annihilated by human agency. From the remarkable size and strength of the thighs, legs, and feet of the Moas, it is clear that the hinder limbs must have constituted powerful locomotive organs; and when we consider the vast swarms of the largest species which existed at some remote period, it seems highly probable that this family of colossal birds,--a family unknown in any other part of the world,--was not originally confined within the narrow geographical limits of modern New Zealand, but ranged over a vast continent now submerged, and of which Phillip and Norfolk Islands, and Chatham and Auckland Islands, and those of New Zealand, are the culminating points.