44 6 



Notes and News. \qci 



Section IV. — Economic Ornithology and Bird Protection. President, 



H. E. Dresser. 



Reports on Investigation of the Food of Birds since 1900. Otto 

 Herman. 



The Usefulness of, and the Harm done by the Sparrow to Agricultur- 

 ists. Igali Svetozar. 



The present state of the Law for the Protection of Birds in Great 

 Britain and Ireland. T. Digby Piggott. 



Bird Legislation in Australia. Sir John Cockburn. 



La Grosseur des Grelaux dangereux pour les Oiseaux. Paul Martin. 



The Red Grouse in its Economic and Recreative Aspects. William 

 Wilson. 



The Rationale of Bird Protection. Frank E. Lemon. 



Section V. — Aviculture. President, E. G. B. Meade-Waldo. 



The importance of Aviculture as an Aid to the Study of Ornithology. 

 D- Seth Smith. 



In a single-page leaflet entitled ' Legaut's Giant Bird ' distributed at the 

 visit of the Congress to Cambridge, though not appearing in the list of 

 papers, Professor Alfred Newton gives his reasons for believing that 

 Legauts' Geant was a Flamingo and not a Ralline bird, and that conse- 

 quently the genus Legautia Schlegel, based on the Geant, has really no 

 foundation. In this view he agrees with Strickland (The Dodo and its 

 Kindred, 1848, p. 60, footnote, and p. 64), who considered the Geant a 

 Flamingo. He adds that "bones of a P/iceuicof ferns have been found in 

 Mauritius," " while among hundreds or even thousands of birds' bones 

 recovered from that island there is not one which can be assigned to a 

 giant Ralline." The genus Legautia was founded on the figure of the 

 Geant given in Legaut's 'Voyage,' but subsequent research has shown 

 that this figure was not original, but copied from a drawing by Collaert, 

 who "died more than one hundred and twenty years before Legaut sailed 

 from Europe." 



An article in a recent number of the ' Avicultural Magazine' entitled 

 ' The Breeding of Song-Sparrows,' records the mating of a male Pileated 

 Song-Sparrow with a female White-eyebrowed Song-Sparrow, and their 

 successful rearing of young, of course in an aviary. While the fact is in 

 itself of interest, we greatly question whether any readers of 'The Auk ' 

 would be able to recognize in the "White-eyebrowed Song-Sparrow" 

 our well-known White-crowned Sparrow without the aid of the techni- 

 cal name, Zonotrichia leucophrys, which fortunately accompanies the 

 'English' name. We have often wondered why it is that English writers 



