The discovery of a fresh and very distinct species in 1870 (thirty-seven years after the first Apteryx australis, Shaw, stood in Lord Derby's Museum) was a thing I, in common with others, did not believe. "Dies diem docet," says Cuvier. I instructed the person who undertook, on my behalf, to make a search for A. maxima, to hunt diligently for A. haastii as well. After more than two years a tin case arrived, containing, among other things, four fine skins, the adult male and female, and the young male and female. These I took to the Meeting of the Zoological Society in Hanover Square, together with the male and female Sceloglaux albifacies, the rarest of the two endemic forms of New-Zealand Owls, being the only examples of the latter ever brought alive to England. Apteryx haastii (named by Mr. T.H. Potts after Dr. Julius Haast) is due to the zeal of the former gentleman, whose account, extracted from the 'Transactions of the New-Zealand Institute,' vol. iv. 1871, art. xxxiii. p. 204, is as follows:—
"In the collection of the Canterbury Museum the Apterygidæ are well represented, more especially in the species which are peculiar to the Middle Island. Some time last summer, amongst a consignment of skins received from Westland was a specimen of a large Apteryx, which presented such peculiarities that it was considered to be a new species by the writer, and named Apteryx haastii, in compliment to Dr. Haast. From a note by the collector it appears to have been obtained on the high ranges. Subsequently a second specimen was procured, the precise locality not given, but probably from the ranges above Okarita. The first specimen (no. 1), which we take to be that of an adult female, may be described thus:—Face, head, and neck dull brown, darkest in a line from the gape to, and immediately behind, the ear, and on the nape; upper surface indistinctly barred with blackish brown and rich fulvous, each feather crossed with marks of dark brown and fulvous, approaching to chestnut on the apical bars; chin greyish brown; throat dull brown, indistinctly marked with fulvous; breast and abdomen dull brown, barred with pale fulvous; straggling hairs about the base of the bill black, some produced to the extent of 3-5 inches; bill yellowish ivory, measuring
