692 Mr. P. R. Lowe on the 



as high as 7000 feet, and, judging from a skull of the last- 

 mentioned form, to be noticed hereafter, they are more 

 Rusticoline than Gallinagine. Seebohm coined his terra 

 " serai- Woodcock " after examination of skins only. He 

 found, however, that the colour-pattern characteristic of the 

 South American forras was much more Gallinagine than 

 Rusticoline, although it is interesting to note that without 

 the aid of osteology he practically summed up the correct 

 nature of these birds, viz., that they were generalised 

 Snipe-like forms — neither true Woodcocks nor true Snipe. 

 Unfortunately, with the exception of the skull of Homo- 

 ptilura, there is no available material in the British Museum 

 wherewith to examine the osteological secrets of this ex- 

 tremely interesting and generalised group, which might throw 

 so much light on the past history of the Scolopacine sub- 

 faraily. Speciraens in the flesh of all such forras are badly 

 wanted. 



The more one studies these and the other southern forras 

 mentioned above, the more impressed one becomes with the 

 fact that in them we have what it is hardly an exaggeration 

 to call a series of " living fossils." They are persistent relics 

 of diverging branches which shot frora the old ancestral 

 trunk — branches which, although they seem to have ai-rived 

 at a blind alley of evolution, reflect in some of their peculi- 

 arities a greater or lesser number of the features which must 

 have characterised the original ancestral stock. They would 

 appear to represent disconnected stages in the gradual (or 

 sudden) evolutionary unfoldings of the Limicoline germinal 

 plasm, and tlie question is — Do they furnish us with any 

 hints which will put us on the right track in attempting to 

 retrace the evolutionary path pursued by their more modern 

 congeners? There are points in the osteological features 

 presented by Cmnocorypha pusilla of the Chatham Islands 

 which might be interpreted in this sense, and, since the 

 skeletal features of this form have never, so far as I am 

 aware, been previously described, I propose to consider them 

 in this paper. 



There are, however, one or two preliminary points to 



