48 BONXTIE—BOWER-BIRD 
In long bones especially the shaft ossifies first, while the ends 
remain for a long time cartilaginous as “ epiphyses” and eventually 
ossify often from a centre of their own, and are only in the adult 
completely fused with the shaft, forming the articulating facets, 
or projecting “processes” for the attachment and leverage of 
muscles. 
BONXIE, the name by which the Great Skua, Stercorarius 
catarrhactes, is known in some of the Shetland Islands, its only 
British habitat. 
BOOBY, said by Prof. Skeat (Htymol. Dict.) to be derived from 
the Spanish or Portuguese bobo—a fool, and that from the Latin 
balbus—stuttering or inarticulate, a name applied, most likely by 
our seamen originally, to certain birds from their stupidity in alight- 
ing upon ships and allowing themselves to be easily taken by the 
hand.!. The Boobies are closely allied to the GANNET, and indeed 
can hardly be separated from the genus Sula, though they differ 
in having no median stripe of bare skin down the front of the 
throat, and they almost invariably breed upon trees instead of rocks, 
and are inhabitants of warmer climates. One of them, S. cyanops, 
when adult has much of the aspect of a Gannet, but S. piscator is 
readily distinguishable by its red legs, and S. leucogaster by its upper 
plumage and neck of deep brown. These three are widely distri- 
buted within the tropics, and are in some places exceedingly abund- 
ant. A fourth, S. variegata, which seems to preserve throughout its 
life the spotted suit characteristic of the immature S. bassana, has a 
much more limited range, being as yet only known from the coast 
of Peru, where it is one of the birds which contribute to the forma- 
tion of guano, 
BOWER-BIRD, Gould’s rather poetical name for some inhabit- 
ants of Australia which, while he was in that country he ascer- 
tained,? as on his return he announced (25 August, 1840) to the 
Zoological Society, to have the extraordinary habit of building what 
the colonists commonly called “runs.” “These constructions ”, he 
rightly said (Proc. Zool. Soc. 1840, p. 94), ‘‘are perfectly anomalous 
in the architecture of birds, and consist in a collection of pieces of 
stick or grass, formed into a bower; or one of them (that of the 
Chlamydera) might be called an avenue, being about three feet in 
length, and seven or eight inches broad inside ; a transverse section 
giving the figure of a horse-shoe, the round part downwards. They 
1 Thus Purchas in his account of Davis’s Second Voyage to India, in 1604-5, 
tells (Pilgrimes, I. bk. iii. p. 182) of. ‘‘fowles called Pashara boues ”—which 
correctly spelt would be Paxaros bobos—at the island of Fernando Norhona. 
Later examples are too numerous to cite. 
2 The discovery seems to have been mainly due to the late Mr. C. Coxen of 
Brisbane. 
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