Miscellanies. 403 
illustrations in the cheapest and in the most rapid manner. There is a 
single printer in London whose stereotype plates are valued at £300,000, 
an outlay which this discovery renders henceforward unnecessary. What 
advantages for printers, booksellers, and the public! 
33. On a gigantic bird sculptured on the tomb of an officer of the house- 
hold of Pharaoh ; by Mr. Bonom1.—In the gallery of organic remains 
in the British Museum, are two large slabs of the new red sandstone 
formation, on which are impressed the footsteps or tracks of birds of 
various sizes, apparently of the stork species. These geological speci- 
mens were obtained, through the agency of Dr. Mantell, from Dr. 
Deane, of Massachusetts, by whom they were discovered in a quarry 
near Turner’s Falls. There have also been discovered by Captain 
Flinders, on the south coast of New Holland, in King George’s Bay, 
some very large nests measuring twenty six feet in circumference and 
thirty two laches in height ; resembling, in dimensions, some that are 
described by Captain Cook, as seen by him on the northeast coast of 
the same island, about 15° south latitude. It would appear, by some 
communications made to the editor of the Atheneum, that Prof. Hitch- 
cock, of Massachusetts, had suggested that these colossal nests belonged 
to the Moa, or gigantic bird-of New Zealand ; of which several spe- 
cies have been determined by Prof. Owen, from bones sent to him from 
New Zealand, where the race is now extinct, but possibly at the present 
time inhabiting the warmer climate of New Holland, in which place 
both Capt. Cook, and recently Capt. Flinders, discovered these large 
nests. Between the years 1821 and 1823 Mr. James Burton discoy- 
ered on the west coast or Egyptian side of the Red Sea, opposite the 
peninsula of Mount Sinai, at a place called Gebel Ezzeit, where for a 
considerable distance the margin of the sea is inaccessible from the 
Desert, three colossal nests within the space of one mile. These nests 
were not in an equal state of preservation ; but, from one more perfect 
than the others, he judged them to be about fifteen feet in height, or, as 
he observed, the height of a camel and its rider. These nests were 
composed of a mass of heterogeneous materials, piled up in the form 
of a cone, and sufficiently well put together to insure adequate solidity. 
The diameter of the cone at its base was estimated as nearly equal to 
its height, and the apex, which terminated in a slight concavity, mea- 
sured about two feet six inches, or three feet, in diameter. The mate- 
rials of which the great mass was composed were sticks and weeds, 
fragments of wreck, and the bones of fishes ; but in one was found the 
thorax of a man, a silver watch, made by George Prior, a London 
watchmaker of the last century, celebrated throughout the East, and 
in the nest or basin, at the apex of the cone, some pieces of woollen 
