See ee ee 

SUPPOSED NEW SPECIES OF NECROPSAR. 31 
After a review, first, of all the known birds of that area, and then of all the 
likely species of Turdoid, Sturnoid, and Formicaroid Passeres, in our general 
collection, I was unable to find any species with which our specimen accurately 
agreed. A scarch in the National Collection which, thanks to the kindness of 
the authorities, I was able to make on more than one occasion, had no better 
results. Dr. Sharpe, even with his unrivalled knowledge of the birds of the 
globe, was unable, without an investigation for which he had then no time to 
spare from other engagements, to assign it to any known genus. A visit to 
America, which interrupted my enquiry, enabled me to search several of the 
more important trans-atlantic museums for its fellow, but also unsuccessfully. 
On a visit paid, shortly after my return to England, to the Hon. Walter 
Rothschild’s Museum at 'l'ring, I compared, with his and Mr. Hartert’s kind 
assistance, whatever species appeared to us there to bear any relationship to 
my specimen, but again fruitlessly. So far I had been looking for, and 
expected to find, some known species that mine could be identified with, for 
I could scarcely believe that an undescribed Mascarene form could have 
remained unrecognised for so many years in a museum visited and worked 
over, from time to time, by one distinguished ornithologist after another. 
Mr. Rothschild, however, recalled to my recollection a ‘reference, which 
had escaped me, in one of the appendices to the second volume of Captain 
Oliver’s edition of The Voyage of Francois Lequat, where, under the heading 
Relation de V Tle Rodrigue,* there occurs the following (translated) paragraph 
on p. 335 :— 
‘‘A little bird is found which is not very common, for it is not found 
on the mainland. One sees it on the Jslet aw Mdt, which is to the 
south of the main island, and I believe it keeps to that islet on account of 
the birds of prey which are on the mainland, as also to feed with more 
facility on the eggs of the fishing birds which feed there, for they feed on 
nothing else but eggs, or some turtles dead of hunger, which they well know 
how to tear out of their shells. These birds are a little larger than a black- 
bird, and have white plumage, part of the wings and tail black, the beak 
yellow, as well as the feet, and make a wonderful warbling. I say a 
warbling, since they have many and altogether different notes. We brought 
up some with cooked meat, cut up very small, which they eat in preference 
to seeds.” 
To the above is appended a note, within square brackets, initialed 
“AN.” [Alfred Newton]: ‘I am at a loss to conjecture what these birds 
were, unless, possibly, of some form allied to Fregilupus.” 
In communicating the felation to the French Academy of Sciences, 
M. Alph. Milne-Edwards remarked that he did “not know in the Mascarene 
Islands any species to which this description can apply.” 
With this Jle aw Mét bird, as above described, our Derby Museum speci- 
men so far agrees in its general white colour, in its yellow feet and bill, and 
in its size being near a blackbird’s; but it differs in having no black on the 

* The manuscript so entitled was discovered, as M. Milne-Edwards has related, by 
M. Rouillard, a magistrate of Mauritius, among the archives of the Ministry of Marine. 
Although there was neither date, nor name of author, attached to it, M. Milne-Edwards 
has been able to establish, from other documentary evidence in the same archives, that 
it was probably written by an intelligent, but somewhat illiterate, practical marine 
surveyor, who was sent to Mauritius, as the result of a Deélibération du Conseil of 20th 
July, 1725, for the purpose of reporting to the Compagnie des Indes as to the fitness of 
the island for one of their establishments, and that its date must, from the evidence of 
subsequently dated Papers in which the Relation is mentioned, be somewhere about, 
or not earlier than, the year 1730. (See the fore-mentioned work by Captain Oliver, 
p- 320.) 
