15

v

The misgivings of Vigors and some other of my zoological contemporaries were as to
the possibility of a terrestrial bird, of the size I supposed, having been able, at any
[right margin: see Vigors letters to Swainson.]
time, to find subsistence in so small a tract as New Zealand.

That island, moreover, had been visited by accomplished naturalists ; and the only
evidence of a wingless bird which they had been able to obtain there, were fragments
and feathers of a small one called "kivi-kivi" by the natives, who hunted it by night
with torches and dogs. M. Lesson accordingly refers the evidences of this bird
brought from New Zealand by the circumnavigatory vessel 'La Coquille,' in 1828, to
the Apteryx australis of Shaw¹. Similar evidence is given by M. D'Urville² and MM.
Quoy and Gaimard³.

The interpretation of a single fragment of bone seemed to my more experienced
seniors too narrow a foundation for the inference "that there had existed, if there does
not now exist, in New Zealand, a struthious bird equal in size to the Ostrich"⁴;
Nevertheless I urged that it was not an Ostrich, consequently not any then known
species of bird, and that it might as well have come from new Zealand as anywhere
else.

Ultimately the admission of this paper into the 'Transactions,' with one plate, was
carried at the Committee, the responsibility of the paper "resting exclusively with
the author."

On the publication of the volume in 1838, ^9-40one hundred extra copies^* of the paper
were struck off ; and these I distributed in every quarter of the islands of New Zealand
where attention to such evidences was likely to be attracted. [handwritten: Impossible and untrue - And if it had
been distributed it contained no information beyond or even equal to that universally known through the land.
And in England since the publication of Polack's book in 1838.]

In this distribution I was efficiently aided by Colonel William Wakefield, at that
period zealously carrying out in New Zealand the principles of colonization advocated
by his brother Mr. Edward Gibbon Wakefield ; by J. R. Gowen, Esq., a Director of the
then recently established "New-Zealand Company;" by my friend Sir William Martin,
the first Chief Justice ; and by the Right Rev. Dr. Selwyn, the first Bishop of the
islands. [handwritten: see Owen's note 1843.]

The confirmatory response, anxiously expected through the years 1840, 1841, and
1842, at length arrived, in the letter from the Rev. William Cotton, M.A.⁵, in that
from Colonel Wakefield, cited at p.109, and in the collections of bones transmitted by
the Rev. William Williams, and received in 1843 by the Rev. Dr Buckland, at Oxford,
and by Dr. (afterwards Sir John) Richardson, as Haslar Hospital.

These specimens, generously confided to me for description, form the subject of the

¹. Zoologie de la Coquille, tom. i. p. 418. ². Voyage de l'Astrolabe, tom. ii. p. 480 (1832).
³. Ib. 'Zoologie.' "Il nous a été impossible de nous procurer le singulier oiseau qu'a figuré Shaw sous le nom
d'Apteryx australis. Nous avons rapporté le manteau d'un Chef qui était recouvert des plumes de cet oiseau
que les Zélandais de la Baie Tolaga connaissent sous le nom de 'Kiwi' " (tom. i. p. 158).
⁴. Proc. Zool. Soc. at sapra. p. 171. ⁵. Proc. Zool. Soc. part xi. 1843. p. 74.

[handwritten: ^*It was his next not this paper which was so distributed
Denques part. I. 1843.]