BY W. T. WHITE, ESQ. 137 
dealt with by those who have especially written on these 
features in Australian bird-life, such as Gould, Ramsay, 
Campbell, and others. 
The Australian Jabiru, until recently, has been con- 
sidered, by writers other than Gould, to be a distinct 
species from Xenorhynchus asiaticus, ZLath., the Indian 
Jabiru. Salvadori, however, points out* that this is not 
the case, and further remarks that naturalists in thinking 
so have been misled by the description of the bird as given 
by Gould, in which that writer states that the feathers of 
the back are black, instead of white, as they undoubtedly 
are, having wrongly regarded the scapularies as dorsal 
plumes. Did this character exist, it were correct to con- 
sider the Australian species as being distinct from the 
Indian, and not identical with it, as Gould appears to have 
done. 
Students of Australian ornithology, in the light only of 
the ordinary text-books on the subject, and unfamiliar with 
the views of Salvadori, will, however, take time to adopt his 
correction, and will welcome the following notes as helping 
to complete the history of our Jabiru, rather than appropriate 
for this purpose what already does so, viz., that which has 
been written from a similar point of view concerning the 
Indian bird. 
There are yet other considerations why it is desirable 
to make this record. 
As Salvadori also has pointed out, Xenorhynchus asiati- 
cus, Lath. (for thus in future must we designate the 
Australian Jabiru), forms two colonies, which are for the 
most part distinct, one colony (with which we are immedi- 
ately concerned) comprising Australia, and extending to 
the islands of Torres Straits and to the south-east of New 
Guinea, the other colony comprising India, Arracan, 
Tenasserim, and Ceylon. It would be interesting, then, to 
establish the fact whether or not the birds which are 
restricted to these separate regions present differences of 
habit, which would probably be the case if this remarkable 
fact in geographical distribution were of very long stand- 
* Ornithologia della Papuasia e delle Molluche, Pt. 3, p. 378. Torino, 
1882, 
