CALIDRIS ARENARIA. 905 
from making him any offer for it. Going to him socn after, on the 20th July, 
we found that he had parted with the greater portion of it to the mate of the 
steamer which was to take us back, but he gave us the choice of what was 
left, whereby we became possessed of a few useful specimens. But there were 
several we had seen on our first visit, which we should have liked to possess, 
among them two Water-Rails’ (§ 8125), and this egg, the parentage of which 
was very problematical, neither of us having before seen anything exactly like 
it. When we reached the steamer we soon arranged for the possession of the 
collection, which we divided, and this egg fell to my share. It had somewhat 
the look of a dwarfed Snipe’s, yet I could not believe it to be so, and both of us 
rather indulged the hope that it might be a Sanderling’s—a species which, 
there is every reason to think, may occasionally breed in Iceland. This hope 
I maintained until I received from Prof. Baird a Sanderling’s egg from the 
first known identified nest (§ 5964), when the want of resemblance between 
them seemed fatal ; but it was curiously revived and even rendered a certainty 
a few years after by the receipt through Dr. Finsch from the North German 
Arctic Expedition of a series of specimens (§ 3965) supplying the mean terms 
of which these had been but the extremes, 
Herr Zimsen was about sixteen or eighteen years of age, and was the only 
person we met in Iceland who shewed the least taste for ornithology. He had 
begun his collection about two years before, being incited thereto by Dr. Kruper, 
who left with him a manuscript list of the birds of Iceland. As a Reykjavik 
shopman he had no chance of indulging his taste, and was, I believe, glad to 
get rid of his collection, the possession of which, lovked on as a boyish fancy, 
vather injured him in his employer's opinion. | 
from Capt. Sabine after his return from an arctic expedition.” Now the last arctic 
expedition on which Sabine was engaged was in 1825, when he was landed from 
H.M.S. ‘Griper’ (Commander Clavering, R.N.) on the Pendulum Islands 
(lat. 74° 30' N.), one of which now bears his name, off the east coast of Greenland, 
for the second half of August. Notwithstanding the lateness of the season one may 
not unreasonably suppose that these eggs—perhaps from forsaken nests—were 
obtained during his stay at this place, which is that whence the Second German 
North-Polar Expedition brought eggs (§ 3965) that, by a process of exhaustion, 
cannot be other than Sanderlings’. Be that as it may, the ege figured by 
Mr. Hewitson, the connexion of which with Sabine need not be doubted, since I knew 
Mr. Leadbeater to be a trustworthy man, is quite unlike any Purple Sandpiper’s I 
possess or have seen, while it so closely resembles an ordinary Sanderling’s that I 
can hardly refrain from believing it to be one. The only account of this voyage 
that I know, and for a knowledge of it I am indebted to Col. Feilden, is Clavering’s 
“ Journal,’ communicated, after his loss at sea in 1827, by Mr. James Smith, of 
Jordanhill, to the ‘Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal’ for April-June, 1830 
(vol. ix. pp. 1-30), and unfortunately the only birds there noticed as seen 
are Rock-Grouse and Swans (p. 23). But there is no mention of what Sabine 
may have obtained while separated from Clavering from the 16th to the 29th of 
August.—Ep. ] 
