This announcement created not a little stir in the scientific world; but as three years passed away without any confirmation of the opinion, certain wise men looked extra wise, and pronounced that the Professor for once “had made a mistake.” But a triumphant vindication was at hand, even from so unpromising a spot as Poverty Bay, in the shape of two goodly boxes crammed full of bones, which looked as if they were the remains of some ante-diluvial pic-nic, where the giants of those days had been picking the scaffolding of the contents of a Brobdignagian pie; and the curiosity connected with the said bones was heightened by a delightfully mysterious history communicated with them by the gentleman from whom they were sent. For the respectable natives, speaking, of course, by the card, had informed him that the bones belonged to a family of extraordinary monsters, one of whom was still in existence in an inaccessible cavern on the side of a hill near the river Wairoa, and that, like the lady in the fairy tales, this creature was jealously guarded by a sort of huge lizard or dragon. Mr. Williams treated these stories as idle fables, but some time after was a little staggered by a sort of corroboration of the tale; for happening to speak to an American about these bones, he was told by him that the bird was still in existence in the neighborhood of Cloudy Bay, in Cook’s Straits, and that the natives there had mentioned to an Englishman of a whaling party, that there was a bird of extraordinary size, to be seen only at night, on the side of a hill near there. Our countryman, with a companion and a native guide, went to the spot on murderous thoughts intent, and after waiting some time, they saw the creature at a little distance, towering to the height of something like sixteen feet. One of the men was said to have proposed to go near and take a shot at it, but the other was so utterly terrified that they contented themselves with looking; and after a time, the monster took the alarm, and, in almost seven-league boots, strode away up the side of the mountain.
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.
In 1850, M. Abadie, captain of a French merchantman, was at Madagascar, and observed one day, in the hands of a native, an egg of enormous size, perforated at one extremity, and used as a basin for various domestic purposes. His curiosity was excited, and he caused search to be made, which led to the discovery of a second egg of nearly similar size, which was found perfectly entire in the bed of a torrent, among the débris of a land slip; and soon after a third egg was found in alluvia of recent formation, all being in the condition termed sub-fossil or partially fossilized. These precious remains were transmitted to Paris, but so carelessly packed, that one was found on their arrival broken to atoms; the other two being happily sound. Casts of these marvelous eggs have been transmitted to Professor Owen, and we can only compare them to huge conoidal cannon-shot. In fact, in these days of cylindrico-conoidal bullets, they might well pass for such a projectile adapted for a sixty-eight pounder. Some idea of their dimensions may be formed from the following facts. The dimensions of the most oval egg (for they differ somewhat in form) are as nearly as possible thirteen and a half inches in length by nine in diameter; and to fill it would require the contents of six ostrich eggs, seventeen of the emu, one hundred and forty-eight of the hen, or fifty thousand of the humming-bird! Various fragments of bones were transmitted to Paris with the eggs, and the comparative anatomists have arrived at the conclusion, that the bird approached the ostrich in its main characteristics, but was of a less slender make than it, and was probably about six times bigger than the largest known bird of that class! To it the term Æpyornis has been applied; the epithet Maximus being appropriately given to the species to which the bones examined belonged.
| [2] | Ælian. Hist. Animal. lib. xiv. c. 7. |
| [3] | Xenophon, Anabesis, lib. 1, c. 5. |