48 BONXIE—BO IVER-BIRD 



In long bones esjjecially the shaft ossifies first, while the ends 

 remain for a long time cartilaginous as " epiphyses " and eventually 

 ossify often from a centre of their own, and are only in the adult 

 completely fused with the shaft, forming the articulating facets, 

 or projecting " processes " for the attachment and leverage of 

 muscles. 



BONXIE, the name by which the Great Skua, Stercorarius 

 catarrhactes, is known in some of the Shetland Islands, its only 

 British habitat. 



BOOBY, said by Prof. Skeat (Efymol. Did.) to be derived from 

 the Spanish or Portuguese hobo — a fool, and that from the Latin 

 balbus — stuttering or inarticulate, a name applied, most likely by 

 our seamen originalh^, to certain birds from their stupidity in alight- 

 ing upon ships and allowing themselves to be easily taken by the 

 hand.^ The Boobies are closely allied to the Gannet, and indeed 

 can hardly be separated from the genus Sulci, though they diff"er 

 in having no median stripe of bare skin down the front of the 

 throat, and they almost invariably breed iipon trees instead of rooks, 

 and are inhabitants of warmer climates. One of them, ;S'. ajanops, 

 Avhen adult has much of the aspect of a Gannet, but aS'. jnscator is 

 readily distinguishable by its red legs, and S. leucogaster by its upper 

 plumage and neck of deep brown. These three are widely distri- 

 buted within the tropics, and are in some places exceedingly abund- 

 ant. A fourth, S. variegata, which seems to preserve throughout its 

 life the spotted suit characteristic of the immature S. hassmui, has a 

 much more limited range, being as yet only known from the coast 

 of Peru, where it is one of the birds which contribute to the forma- 

 tion of guano. 



BOWEPi-BIRD, Gould's rather poetical name for some inhabit- 

 ants of Australia which, while he was in that country he ascer- 

 tained,^ as on his return he announced (25 August, 18-iO) to the 

 Zoological Society, to have the extraordinary habit of building what 

 the colonists commonly called "runs." "These constructions", he 

 rightly said {Proc. Zool. Soc. 1840, p. 94), "are perfectly anomalous 

 in the architecture of birds, and consist in a collection of pieces of 

 stick or grass, formed into a bower ; or one of them (that of the 

 Chlamydera) might be called an avenue, being about three feet in 

 length, and seven or eight inches broad inside ; a transverse section 

 giving the figure of a horse-shoe, the round part downwards. They 



^ Thus Purclias in liis account of Davis's Second Voyage to India, in 1604-5, 

 tells {Pilgrimcs, I. bk. iii. p. 132) of "fowles called Pashara boues" — which 

 correctly spelt would be Paxaros bobos — at the island of Fernando Norhona. 

 Later examples are too numerous to cite. 



- The discovery seems to have been mainly due to the late llr. C. Coxen of 

 Brisbane. 



