of the Extinct Droraaeus ater. 3 



as Droniceus novce-hoUandice was then called ; and it does not 

 seem qnite certain who first discovered that there was a 

 " Great " and a " Lesser " Emeu. From a letter to ' Nature ' 

 by Prof. Alfred Newton, to which I shall refer later, it 

 would appear that such a distinction was made in Bullock's 

 Museum as early as 1812. Vieillot proposed the name which 

 the small Emeu now bears in 1817 (Nouv. Diet. x. p. 212), but 

 he did not then properly define the species, being evidently, 

 as is shown by what he wrote on the subject, under the 

 impression that the smaller and darker specimens were birds 

 which had not attained their full growth. It was, so far as 

 I am aware, first thoroughly defined by Bonaparte as late 

 as 1856 (Comptes Rend, xliii. p. 841. n. 5), when he gave 

 full zoological and anatomical differential characters distin- 

 guishing D. ater from D. novcs-hollandue . Fuller details of the 

 distinctive characters of T). ater, and an excellent coloured 

 plate of the mounted specimen in the Paris Museum, were 

 published thirty-seven years later by A. Milne-Edwards and 

 E. Oustalet * ; a few further notes on the same bird, with 

 sketches of the head from life by Lesucur, Avere published by 

 the same authors in the ' Bulletin du Museum d^Histoire 

 Naturelle,' 1899, n. 5, p. 206. The most important point 

 contained in these notes, based on MSS. of Lesueur now in the 

 Museum at Havre, is that, previous to their visit to Kangaroo 

 Island, viz. in December 1802, the French naturalists of 

 Baudin's expedition landed and camped for some days on 

 King Island, off the western entrance to Bass Straits. Thev 

 found there six sealers headed by one Cowper, who showed 

 them considerable attentions; from him they learnt that a 

 small dark ''Ilemeo,''' as the English name is spelled, or 

 ^'Casoar," was so common on the island that Cowper asserted 

 that he had himself killed 300. This easily explains how, 

 through the agency of sealers and their dogs, the Emeu on 

 King Island soon became extinct; it is quite possible that it 

 was the Lesser one, 1). ater, but that has not been proved. 



* A. Milne-Edwards et E. Oustalet, '* Notice sur quelques Espece.s 

 d'Oiseaux actuellemeut ^teintes," etc., etc., in 'Volume commt^raoratif 

 du Centeiiaire de la Fondation du Museum,' p. 251, pi. v. (Paris, 1893). 



b2 



