Professor Owen soon determined that the bones sent to him were portions of a gigantic bird allied to the ostrich, and the publication of this announcement, stimulating inquiry in New Zealand, box after box, full of interesting specimens, found their way to the College of Surgeons, and proved the existence, at no very remote period in the island of New Zealand, of at least six different species of Dinornis (as the bird has been named,) the largest certainly not less than ten feet in height; and in the eloquent words of the Professor, “without giving the rein to a too exuberant fancy, we may take a retrospective glance at the scene of a fair island, offering, by the will of a bountiful Providence, a well-spread table to a race of animated beings peculiarly adapted to enjoy it; and we may recall the time when the several species of Dinornis ranged the lords of its soil—the highest living forms upon that part of the earth. No terrestrial mammal was there to contest this sovereignty with the feathered bipeds before the arrival of man.” But what has become of all these huge birds, for we no longer hear of able seamen or nervous natives being scared by their apparitions? In all probability they gradually became exterminated by the earliest colonists who set foot on this lovely portion of the globe. Conspicuous as to size, heavy in form, stupid, and unprovided with means of escape or defense, the Dinornis would easily fall a victim to the destructive arts of man; and although strong hopes to the contrary have been entertained, there is good reason to suppose that all the varieties of the race have been extinct for very many years; consequently the mysterious inhabitant of the cave, and the apparition that strode up the mountain-side, were doubtless legends that had descended from generation to generation from the distant ancestors of the aborigines of the island. There is to be seen in the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, a considerable portion of the skeleton of a Dinornis, mounted by the side of that of a large ostrich, above which it towers in the same proportion as its neighbor O’Brien, the Irish giant, towers above all ordinary men. Gigantic though these New Zealand birds must have been, they were fully equalled in size by a race of birds coeval with them in the island of Madagascar; and it is remarkable that our chief knowledge of the existence of these is derived from that most fragile and perishable of their products—their eggs.