BuLLER. — On New Zealand Ornithology. 333 



the Flightless Duck of the Auckland Islands {Nesonctta anck- 

 landica) ; and this bird is now so rare that, on the last visit 

 of the " Hinemoa" to those islands with His Excellency the 

 Governor, Sir James Hector, who accompanied the expedi- 

 tion and was most anxious to procure some for the Cam- 

 bridge University Museum, found the utmost difficulty in 

 collecting three specimens, although the whole ship's crew 

 were on the look-out for them ; and so with several other 

 comparatively rare species. Of course, it is a good thing that 

 these extensive collections have found their way into Mr. 

 Eothschild's possession, because he makes excellent use of 

 them, being himself one of the most active of our working 

 ornithologists ; besides which he is a liberal donor to other 

 pubHc museums. His own zoological museum at Tring Park 

 is one of the most perfect of its kind in the world. It con- 

 tains priceless treasures, and its great merit in the eyes of a 

 practical ornithologist is that it possesses huge series of speci- 

 mens, whenever that is possible, thus minimising the ever- 

 present danger of generalising on insufficient data. But, 

 whilst lully recognising all this, one cannot but acknowledge 

 and deplore the fact that in our own museums nearly all the 

 native species are imperfectly, or, at any rate, insufficiently, 

 represented. 



Canon Tristram himself has a beautiful collection of New 

 Zealand birds, comprising all the rarer forms, but he is con- 

 tent with a small series of each species, such as male, female, 

 young, and seasonal states. It is to be hoped that his splendid 

 collection of birds from all parts of the world — the accumula- 

 tion of a lifetime — may ere long find a resting-place in one of 

 the provincial museums, instead of being dispersed, as too 

 often happens, at the owner's death. That was the fate of 

 the celebrated Jardine collection, when some very choice and 

 rare New Zealand specimens found their way into other 

 hands. This collection contained many skins procured in 

 New Zealand by Mr. Percy Earl, and purchased by Sir 

 William Jardine as far back as 1842 — such forms, for 

 example, as Coturnix nov cb- zeal audi cb and Pogonornis cincta. 



Whilst the Eothschild Museum boasts the possession of 

 seventy or more Stitch-birds (Pogonornis cincta) of both sexes, 

 the Colonial Museum and the Auckland Museum are the only 

 ones that can exhibit sexual pairs of this species, which now 

 exists on the Little Barrier Island and nowhere else. To say 

 nothing of so rare a form as Notornis mantelli — of which there 

 are only three known specimens, two in the British Museum 

 and one at Dresden — there are many of our indigenous birds 

 wholly absent from our local museums, whilst others have 

 only a single representative. For example, the Colonial 

 Museum possesses one Auckland Island Merganser and one 



