From the difference in the _strength_ of the bone, the ostrich being unable to fly, so must have been unable this unknown bird; and so our anatomist came to the conclusion that this old shapeless bone indicated the former existence in New Zealand of some huge bird, at least as great as an ostrich, but of a far heavier and more sluggish kind. Professor Owen was confident of the validity of his conclusions, but would communicate that confidence to no one else; and notwithstanding attempts to dissuade him from committing his views to the public, he printed his deductions in the _Transactions of the Zoological Society for 1839_, where fortunately they remain on record as conclusive evidence of the fact of his having then made this guess, so to speak, in the dark. He caused the bone, however, to be engraved; and having sent a hundred copies of the engraving to New Zealand, in the hope of their being distributed and leading to interesting results, he patiently waited for three years,--viz. till the year 1842,--when he received intelligence from Dr. Buckland, at Oxford, that a great box, just arrived from New Zealand, consigned to himself, was on its way, unopened, to Professor Owen, who found it filled with bones, palpably of a bird, one of which bones was three feet in length, and much more than double the size of any bone in the ostrich! And out of the contents of this box the Professor was positively enabled to articulate almost the entire skeleton of a huge wingless bird between TEN and ELEVEN feet in height, its bony structure in strict conformity with the fragment in question; and that skeleton may at any time be seen at the Museum of the College of Surgeons, towering over, and nearly twice the height of, the skeleton of an ostrich; and at its feet lying the old bone from which alone consummate anatomical science had deduced such an astounding reality,--the existence of an enormous extinct creature of the bird kind, in an island where previously no bird had been known to exist larger than a pheasant or a common fowl!--_Lecture on the Moral and Intellectual Development of the present Age._[37] “THE MAESTRICHT SAURIAN FOSSIL” A FRAUD.