Letters, Announcements, ^c. 349 



of Australia has been knovvu for years ; and that the late Mr. 

 Thomas Wall was the first who actually procured a skin of it is 

 also a fact not to be disputed ; but as this species had never been 

 seen by persons competent to give a tolerably correct description 

 of it, I was not at all surprised that the account which Mr. 

 Gould furnished of a Cassowary in his ' Handbook of the Birds 

 of Australia^ (vol. ii. pp. 206, 207), received secondhand from 

 a member of Kennedy^s expedition, did not agree with Mr. John- 

 son's specimen. 



After Mr. Carron's return to Sydney, in or about May 1854, 

 he gave Mr. W. S. Wall {the former Curator of the xVustralian 

 Museum) the particulars about the bird procured by his brother, 

 which were subsequently published in the long-defunct news- 

 paper whence Mr. Gould copied his account ; and these are totally 

 incorrect if the species to which they refer is that to which I 

 have applied the name of Casuarius johnsoni. They describe 

 the bird as being of a " dark brown ^' with a " bright red " 

 helmet, while " to the neck are attached, like bells, six or eight 

 round fleshy balls of bright blue and scarlet.^' Now my bird has 

 black feathers, a horn-coloured helmet, and two blue wattles. Is 

 it not possible, then, that the brown, red-helmeted, and six-or- 

 eifjht -wattled Cassowary is still at large ? But at any rate I 

 conceive that, if any person had a right to choose a name for the 

 bird given by Mr. Johnson, I had; for I gave the first correct 

 description of it, on its being deposited in this museum, the 

 largest in the southern hemisphere, while the specimen procured 

 by Wall has been long since lost. 



With regard to your remarks on the Pitta figured by Mr. 

 Diggles, to which you draw my attention, I have to say that 1 

 incline to your opinion that it is a new species, and that it is my 

 fault that Mr. Diggles did not describe it as such. I purchased 

 the specimen from a collector who has only too often given 

 wrong localities. He stated that the bii'd had been shot at Cape 

 Yorkj and I thought that he had got it from a New-Guinea 

 trader, but that, even if obtained at the Cape, it might be iden- 

 tical with Pitta mackloti, of which I had not then seen a figure. 

 Mr. Elliot's ' Monograph of the Pittidce' is not in the Museum 

 library ; and the colours of Tcmmiuck's figure (PI. Col. 547) appear 



