54 THE GREAT AUK 



which we have but fragments. ... It would be a great 

 thing if you could persuade the people there to let you 

 bring them home to have them done and certainly 

 there is no other place where they could be done properly 

 except Cambridge, because we have here by far the most 

 complete skeleton of the Dodo, and almost without 

 exception all the remains of the other birds, which were 

 described by my late brother Edward and Gadow in the 

 Transactions of the Zoological Society, and it would 

 be a pity if these were described anywhere else.* 



When his brother Edward was transferred to the 

 post of Lieutenant- Governor of Jamaica, Newton was 

 enabled to make a valuable collection of the birds of that 

 and other West Indian islands. It was mainly due to 

 Newton also that the ' ' Sandwich Islands Committee ' 

 of the British Association was formed and the fast 

 vanishing fauna of that region studied. 



As an East Anglian Newton was naturally greatly 

 interested in another extinct (so far as Britain is con- 

 cerned) bird, the Great Bustard, or as he liked to call it, 

 the Norfolk Bustard, which had vanished from this 

 country during his own lifetime. Though there were 

 still a few birds lingering in Norfolk in the " thirties," 

 particularly in the neighbourhood of his father's estate 

 of Elveden, it is doubtful if Newton ever saw a native 

 Bustard alive. He made an attempt to see a bird 

 between Cambridge and Ely in 1856, but was too late. 



Last week I was at Cambridge, and there heard a 

 report that a Bustard had been seen in the neighbour- 

 hood. I accordingly went to Burwell Fen, in company 

 with my brother and a gentleman interested in Orni- 

 thology, and on searching a field of coleseed we found 

 several feathers which were most undoubtedly those of 

 the Great Bustard. The gentleman who accompanied 

 us had been there a few days before and had not only 



* Letter to E. G. B. Meade-Waldo, October 29, 1905. 



