In New Zealand also there existed, within the memory of the Maori ancestry, huge birds having their nearest affinities to the still existing apteryx of that island, but generically distinct from that and all other known birds. I have proposed the name of Dinornis for this now extinct genus, of which more than a dozen well-defined species have come to my knowledge, all peculiar to New Zealand, and the last discovered the strangest, by reason of the elephantine proportions of its feet. A tridactyle wingless bird of another genus, Æpyornis, second only to the gigantic Dinornis in size, appears to have only recently become extinct--if it be extinct--in the island of Madagascar. The egg of this bird, which may have suggested to the Arabian voyagers, attaining Madagascar from the Red Sea, the idea of the Roc of their romances, would hold the contents of six eggs of the ostrich, sixteen eggs of the cassowary, and one hundred and forty-eight eggs of the common fowl. Had all the terrestrial animals that now exist diverged from one common centre within the limited period of a few thousand years, it might have been expected that the remoteness of their actual localities from such ideal centre would bear a certain ratio with their respective powers of locomotion. With regard to the class of birds, one might have expected to find that those which were deprived of the power of flight, and were adapted to subsist on the vegetation of a warm or temperate latitude, would still be met with more or less associated together, and least distant from the original centre of dispersion situated in such a latitude. But what is the fact? The species of no one order of birds is more widely dispersed over the earth than the wingless or struthious kind. Assuming that the original centre has been somewhere in the southwestern mountain range of Asia, there is but one of the species of flightless birds whose habitat can be reconciled with the hypothesis. By the neck of land still uniting Asia with Africa, the progeny of the primary pair created or liberated at the hypothetical centre might have traveled to the latter continent, and there have propagated and dispersed themselves southward to the Cape of Good Hope. It is remarkable, however, that the ostrich should not have migrated eastward over the vast plains or steppes which extend along the warmer temperate zone of Asia, or have reached the southern tropical regions; it is in fact scarcely known in the Asiatic continent, being restricted to the Arabian deserts, and being rare even in those parts which are most contiguous to what I have called its proper continent, Africa. If we next consider the locality of the cassowary, we find great difficulty in conceiving how such a bird could have migrated to the islands of Java, the Moluccas, or New Guinea, from the continent of Asia. The cassowary is not web-footed like the swimming birds; for wings it has only a few short and strong quills. How could it