SWAN 933 
nasal knob, a black neck and the rest of its plumage pure white. 
It has been introduced into Kurope, and breeds freely in confinement. 
A greater interest than attaches to the South-American birds 
last mentioned is that which invests the Black Swan of Australia. 
Considered for so many centuries to be an impossibility, the know- 
ledge of its existence seems to have impressed (more perhaps than 
anything else) the popular mind with the notion of the extreme 
divergence—not to say the contrariety—of the organic products of 
that country. By a singular stroke of fortune we are able to name 
the precise day on which this unexpected discovery was made. The 
Dutch navigator Willem de Vlaming, visiting the west coast of 
Zuidland (Southland), sent two of his boats on the 6th of January 
1697 to explore an estuary he had found. ‘There their crews saw at 
first two and then more Black Swans, of which they caught four, 
taking two of them alive to Batavia ; and Valentyn, who several years 
later recounted this voyage, gives in his work! a plate representing 
the ship, boats and birds, at the mouth of what is now known from 
this circumstance as Swan River, the most important stream of the 
thriving colony of Western Australia, which has adopted this very 
bird as its armorial symbol. Valentyn, however, was not the first to 
publish this interesting discovery. News of it soon reached Amster- 
dam, and the burgomaster of that city, Witsen by name, himself a 
fellow of the Royal Society, lost no time in communicating the 
chief facts ascertained, and among them the finding of the Black 
Swans, to Martin Lister, by whom they were laid before that society 
in October 1698 (Phil. Trans. xx. p. 361). Subsequent voyagers, 
Cook and others, found that the range of the species extended over 
the greater part of Australia, in many districts of which it was 
abundant. It has since rapidly decreased in numbers, and will 
most likely soon cease to exist as a wild bird, but its singular and 
ornamental appearance will probably preserve it as a modified 
captive in most civilized countries, and perhaps even now there are 
more Black Swans in a reclaimed condition in other lands than are 
~at large in their mother-country. The species scarcely needs 
description: the sooty-black of its general plumage is relieved 
by the snowy white of its flight-feathers and its coral-like bill 
banded with ivory. 
The Cygnine admittedly form a well-defined group of the Family 
Anatidx, and there is now no doubt as to its limits, except in the 
case of the Cascaroba above mentioned. This bird would seem to 
be, as is so often found in members of the South-American fauna, a 
more generalized form, presenting several characteristics of the 
Anatinex, while the rest, even its Black-necked compatriot and the 
1 Commonly quoted as Oud en Nicuw Oost Indien (Amsterdam: 1726). The 
incidents of the voyage are related in Deel iii. Boek i. Hoofdst. iv. (which has 
for its title Beschwijvinge van Banda), pp. 68-71. 
