°,8o6 I Recent Literature. 6 1 



P. nympha on the Japanese island Tsu-sima, in the Straits of Corea, as 

 well as in Borneo ; the species being for the most part natives of the 

 Eastern Archipelago, but extending into India, Ceylon and China, the 

 Philippine and Papuan Islands, to New Guinea and northern Australia. 



As the author states in his Preface, the present is an entirely new 

 Monograph of the Pittid;e, the text of the earlier Monograph having been 

 discarded and that of the present written " as if the subject had only 

 now for the lirst time engaged my [his] attention." A few of the 

 plates of the first edition have been retained, but the majority are from 

 new drawings by Mr. W. Hart of London, who has most skilfully exe- 

 cuted his task. The Pittas constitute one of the most beautiful families 

 of birds, their striking and yet pleasing display of colors rendering them 

 a most attractive subject for the monographer. " It is not often," says 

 our author, "that one returns to his first love and finds her, after many 

 years, more beautiful than ever," as his been his experience in the present 

 instance. — J. A. A 



The Fossil Birds of Patagonia. 1 — -It may he a little late to notice Dr. 

 Ameghino's memoir, but as the work has not been reviewed in 'The 

 Auk," and as some of the birds described therein are truly extraordinary, 

 it is perhaps a case of better late than never; moreover, there are one or 

 two points concerning these birds and Dr. Lvdekker's notice of them 2 

 that deserve at least a passing notice. In this memoir Dr. Ameghino 

 describes the remains of thirty-two species of birds from the Eocene of 

 Patagonia, fifteen of which, as well as nine genera and one family, are 

 new. The main interest of the paper, however, centers about the gigantic 

 forms for whose reception the order Stereornithes was established by 

 Moreno and Mercerat in 1891. These authors have distributed in four 

 families the various genera placed by Dr. Ameghino in the family 

 Phororhacidae, although this grouping must be largely a matter of 

 opinion, since the parts most necessary for a family diagnosis are lacking. 

 Not all the species of the family are large, but the leading members of 

 the group, Phororhacos and Brontornis, were birds of great size, rivalling 

 in bulk the ^Spyorms of Madagascar and the Moas of New Zealand, while 

 they were, like them, flightless. The reduction of the wing had not, 

 however, proceeded so far as in the last named birds. A remarkable 

 feature of the genus Phororhacos is the great size of the skvdl, which in 

 P. ittflatus is 13 inches long and 5^ inches across the articular portion, 

 while the mandible of P. longissimus is 21 inches in length and 8 inches 

 across the condyles. Small wonder that the symphysis of such a jaw, 



1 Eiorentino Ameghino | Sur les | Oiseaux Fossiles | de Patagonie | Extrait 

 du Boletin del Instituto Geografico Argentino | tome XV, cahiers 11 et 12 | 

 Buenos Ay res | 1895. 



2 Knowledge, London. June. 1895. 



