1893. NOTES AND COMMENTS. 85 
sometimes rather malignant, of the labours of such great men as 
Agardh and Harvey proceeds mostly from Germany, where the com- 
plaint is made that they were not minute histologists, and did not 
proceed on the lines laid down in the most recent book on the 
Mikrotechnik of Botany. Their only productive systemutists in this 
branch of science, Kiitzing and Rabenhorst, conspicuously failed to 
reach the standard of Agardh and Harvey in this respect, and the 
young German school has yet to show that improved instruments 
will profit them to the extent of producing a single systematist of the 
first rank—one whom they can place alongside of Thuret and Bornet 
in France. The first great phycological systematist ‘‘ made in 
Germany ” will obtain a hearty welcome. 
Mr. Bracebridge Wilson, of the Church of England Grammar 
School at Geelong, Victoria, who has collected many of the new forms 
described by Agardh, has printed a very useful list of his collection 
of Alge. He rivals Mr. George Clifton and other correspondents 
of Harvey in the palmy days of collecting Australian Alge, when new 
forms needed less looking for than in these later times. 
THE PLIOCENE BIRDS OF OREGON. 
In a recent issue of the Fournal of the Academy of Sciences of Phila- 
delpia (ser. 2, vol. ix.,-pp. 389-425, pls. xv.—xvii.), Dr. R. W. 
Shufeldt contributes an interesting memoir on the fossil bird-remains 
from the later Pliocene deposits of the Silver Lake district, Oregon. 
The bird-bones obtained from these deposits are generally more or less 
nearly perfect, and are in almost all cases sufficiently well preserved 
to fully justify the author in the determinations he has made. The 
majority of the forms belong to existing genera and species, and 
the bird-life of the Oregon lakes in Pliocene times must accordingly 
have been very similar to that of the present day. Then, as 
now, great flocks of swans, geese, and ducks frequented the lakes 
at certain seasons of the year; while cormorants and pelicans lined 
the shores, and gulls and terns hovered in the air. Grebes also 
frequented the sedges, and sandpipers and phaleropes coursed along 
the marge of the waters. Still, however, in spite of this general 
similarity in the avifauna of the past and present, there were certain 
types in the former epoch which would be missed now. For instance, 
there was a ponderous goose, and likewise a swan, both of which are 
now extinct. More remarkable, however, was the presence of a 
gigantic cormorant, of even larger size than the recently éxtinct 
Pallas’s cormorant of Behring Island; and scarcely less so was that of 
a flamingo, of which numerous characteristic bones are figured. 
Herons were represented by an extinct species of the type genus; 
and a similar remark will apply to the group of eagles. More note- 
worthy, however, is the presence of a grouse believed to belong to an 
extinct genus; although it must be confessed that it would have 
