60 ON THE AUSTRALIAN CASSOWARY. 



Sydacn Herald on June 3rd, 1854. In 1866, Walter Scott, of 

 the Herbert River, got a bunch of cassowary featliers in a blacks' 

 camp and sent it home to Dr. P. L. Sclater, who exhibited it to 

 the Zoological Society. At the meeting of that Society, on 

 June 11th, 1868, Sclater exhibited a complete skin received from 

 Walter Scott, and taken from a bird shot by Henry Stone at 

 Herbert Vale Station. The first skeleton was also sent home by 

 Scott, and given l)y Sclater to the Royal College of Surgeons in 

 1871. The first Australian cassowary in England was sent in 

 the ship Piammij, care of Captain Cave, by the Marquis of 

 Normanby in October, 1874. This bird was obtained at Card- 

 well by Lord Henry Phipps from Mr. and Mrs. Conn, who were 

 afterwards murdered by the blacks. On March 16th, 1871, W. 

 J. Scott again wrote from the Valley of Lagoons, telling the 

 Zoological Society that a planter named Haig, on the Lower 

 Herbert, had caught a full grown specimen, and was desirous of 

 presenting it to the Society. This is the first recorded capture 

 of a Queensland cassowary. Dr. E. P. Ramsay, Curator of the 

 Australian Museum, obtained two young ones while at Cardwell 

 in March, 1874, and the second one received in England was 

 sent home by him to the Zoological Society and delivered on 

 May 28th, 1875. 



The Australian cassowary is found only in North Queens- 

 land on the east coast from the Cardwell Range to Cape York. 

 A correspondent informed me that one was seen within 12 miles 

 of Charters Towers, but this requires confirmation. The Card- 

 well blacks say the cassowary has rambled farther south since 

 the advent of the white man, and a solitary bird may have even 

 wandered along the coast range, and through the scrubs of the 

 Burdekin to within 12 miles of Charters Towers, impelled by 

 the same restless spirit that sent a Port Essington buffalo to the 

 plains of the Flinders. 



The cassowary is an inhabitant of the dense tropical jungle 

 that clothes from base to summit the coast ranges of the Cape 

 York Peninsula. This jungle also covers the level country 

 between the mountains and the seabeach from Cardwell to Cook- 

 town. It crosses the range and extends, in places, for some dis- 

 tance on the western slopes. The cassowary follows that jungle 

 to its outer edges, east and west, but I possess no record of any 



