SIVAJV 933 



nasal knob, a black neck and the rest of its plumage pure white. 

 It has been introduced into Europe, and breeds freely in confinement. 



A greater interest than attaches to the South- American birds 

 last mentioned is that which invests the Black Swan of Australia. 

 Considered for so many centuries to be an impossibility, the know- 

 ledge of its existence seems to have impressed (more perhaps than 

 anything else) the popular mind with the notion of the extreme 

 divergence — not to say the contrariety — of the organic products of 

 that country. By a singular stroke of fortune we are able to name 

 the precise day on which this unexpected discovery was made. The 

 Dutch navigator Willem de Vlaming, visiting the west coast of 

 Zuidland (Southland), sent two of his boats on the 6th of January 

 1697 to explore an estuary he had found. There their crews saw at 

 first two and then more Black Swans, of which they caught four, 

 taking two of them alive to Batavia ; and Valentyn, who several years 

 later recounted this voyage, gives in his work ^ a plate representing 

 the ship, boats and birds, at the mouth of what is now known from 

 this circumstance as Swan River, the most important stream of the 

 thriving colony of Western Australia, which has adopted this very 

 bird as its armorial symbol. Valentyn, however, was not the first to 

 publish this interesting discovery. News of it soon reached Amster- 

 dam, and the burgomaster of that city, Witsen by name, himself a 

 fellow of the Royal Society, lost no time in communicating the 

 chief facts ascertained, and among them the finding of the Black 

 Swans, to Martin Lister, by whom they were laid before that society 

 in October 1698 (Fhil. Trans, xx. p. 361). Subsequent voyagers, 

 Cook and others, found that the range of the species extended over 

 the greater part of Australia, in many districts of which it was 

 abundant. It has since rapidly decreased in numbers, and will 

 most likely soon cease to exist as a wild bird, but its singular and 

 ornamental appearance will probably preserve it as a modified 

 captive in most civilized countries, and perhaps even now there are 

 more Black Swans in a reclaimed condition in other lands than are 

 at large in their mother-country. The species scarcely needs 

 description : the sooty-black of its general plumage is relieved 

 by the snowy white of its flight-feathers and its coral-like bill 

 banded with ivory. 



The Cygninse. admittedly form a well-defined group of the Family 

 Anatidse, and there is now no doubt as to its limits, except in the 

 case of the Cascaroba above mentioned. This bird would seem to 

 be, as is so often found in members of the South- American fauna, a 

 more generalized form, presenting several characteristics of the 

 Ancdinse, while the rest, even its Black-necked compatriot and the 



^ Commonly quoted as Oud en Nieuw Oost Indien (Amsterdam : 1726). The 

 incidents of the voyage are related in Deel iii. Boek i. Hoofdst. iv. (which has 

 for its title Beschrijvinge van Banda), pp. 68-71. 



