

Bulletin 
of the 
Liverpool Museums 
UNDER THE CITY COUNCIL. 

Edited by H. O. Forbes, LL.D., Director of Museums. 
_ Oe a eee a ee eee eee eens EEE 
Vou. I FEBRUARY, 1898. No. 2. 
Ce i SG et PR, Mae wee seers cane 3? 
nL 
On an apparently new, and supposed to be now 
extinct, species of Bird from the Mascarene 
Islands, provisionally referred to the genus 
Necropsar. 
By Henry O. Forses, LL.D., M.B.O.U. 
(Puate I. Stwrnide.) 
To the zoologist or the botanist the mere mention of island forms of life 
calls up clusters of most fascinating associations. He is transported to scenes 
where the expiring survivors of some fast-vanishing race, with every mark of 
ancientness upon them, have held their own against time and chance within 
their water-walled sanctuary ; or among peculiar forms in whose unfamiliar 
features, transformed and modified through long isolation, the birth-marks of 
their lineage can hardly be traced. He is in companionship with struggling 
exiles, clinging to life in the secluded, but hospitable, forest depths, or in the 
mountain recesses of their sea-girt prison, cut off by half a hemisphere, may- 
hap, from the present home of their kith and kin. 
None, perhaps, of all the ocean isles can surpass, as Professor Newton has 
well remarked, the Mascarene Islands in the “wealth and multifariousness of 
their ornithic population”; and from few, except perhaps New Zealand and 
its satellite, the Chatham Islands, have so many species with an interest- 
ing past been recalled from oblivion. Thence have been rescued, by 
fortunate chance and persevering quest, the scattered bones of that obese 
Ground-pigeon, the Solitaire, and “that extraordinary production of nature 
known by the name of the Dodo ». of such strange Rails, as the wingless 
Aphanapteryx, the pugnacious Erythromachus and the giant Coot, Leguatia ; 
of that antique crested parrot Lophopsittacus mauritianus, as well as of the 
uncouth Apyornis, the moa-like ostrich of Madagascar, one of whose ponder- 
ous eggs would have been load enough for a youth. Thence also have been 
recovered fragments of pristine apes, and carapaces of gigantic tortoises bigger 
c 
