466 



NA rURE 



[March 17, 1892 



well known, not one remains ; but fortunately, at the 

 breaking up of the last in 1806, a few were bought by the 

 then Lord Stanley, who (dying in 1851, as thirteenth 

 Earl of Derby, and President of the Zoological Society) 

 bequeathed his collection to the borough of Liverpool, 

 and there, thanks to the care that has been taken of 

 them, they still exist in fair condition. A few more were 

 bought for the private collection of the then Emperor of 

 Austria, and are still carefully preserved in the Museum 

 of Vienna. Of several of the species it is not known that 

 any other specimens were brought to P2urope until some 

 three years ago. On both of Cook's previous voyages 

 qualified naturalists had been sent ; but, as is known, the 

 arrangements for publishing their discoveries were so 

 imperfect that little credit followed to anyone concerned. 

 On this, his third and last voyage, there was no expert, 

 though Mr. William Ellis, who in an irregularly pub- 

 lished narrative, calls himself " Assistant Surgeon to both 

 vessels," was somewhat of a draughtsman, and made a 

 series of sketches, which, becoming the property of Banks, 

 subsequently passed to the British Museum. The com- 

 moner species of Sandwich-Island birds are generally 

 recognizable, but others are so unhappily limned that 

 even the word caricature (which always implies some 

 likeness) seems too strong to apply to them. Neverthe- 

 less, Mr. G. R. Gray adventured to determine all of 

 them. 



More than a quarter of a century passed before any 

 further progress was made in the knowledge of the zoology 

 of the Sandwich Isles, though they were visited by nume- 

 rous ships, and in 1794 were ceded to Britain under 

 Vancouver. In 1814 an attempt was made to seize them 

 for Russia ; and Kotzebue, whose voyage has so much 

 scientific interest, was there in 18 16-17, but the accom- 

 plished naturalists, Chamisso and Eschscholtz, who were 

 with him, took little heed of the fauna of the islands.^ 

 The year 1822 saw the arrival of the more celebrated 

 William Ellis, whose missionary labours throughout the 

 Pacific and in Madagascar are so widely known. The 

 Sandwich Isles had by that time fallen under the sway 

 of the conquering Kamehameha I., whose son and suc- 

 cessor, desirous of seeing European civilization, arrived 

 in England in 1824 with his wife — both to die of measles 

 within a few weeks. The British Government deter- 

 mined to send their remains for interment in Honolulu, 

 by that time become the capital of the islands, and ac- 

 cordingly H.M.S. Blonde^ commanded by George Anson 

 seventh Lord Byron (first cousin and successor to the 

 poet), was commissioned to convey the dismal freight. 

 The duty was performed, and the islands again were 

 ceded to the British Crown, but again declined. On 

 board the Blonde sailed as chaplain Mr. Rowland Bloxam, 

 together with his brother Andrew, who was somewhat 

 of a naturalist, and it was intended that the published 

 account of her voyage should contain a proper appendix 

 on the natural history of the islands. An "Appendix" 

 there indeed is, but one utterly unworthy of its reputed 

 author, for the book was edited by a lady (as I have 

 been informed) who had nothing but a few of his notes 

 to guide her, and though assisted, as it is stated, by 

 " the gentlemen connected with that department in the 

 British Museum," is a disgrace to all concerned, since, 

 so far from advancing the knowledge of the subject, it 

 introduced so much confusion as to mislead many sub- 

 sequent writers."-^ Some years later another great oppor- 

 tunity was missed, and this time by the Am.erican tra- 

 veller Townsend, who, after crossing the Rocky Mountains 

 to the Columbia River, sailed, in company with Nuttall, 

 the well-known naturalist, for the Sandwich Islands, 

 where they arrived in January 1836, and stayed nearly 



1^ The same negative results attended his second visit in 1824-25. 



" I have reason to beheve that Mr. Bloxam's original notes are stil! in 

 existence, though hitherto they have not been accessible to me. It is possible 

 that they would remove uncertainty on several points. 



NO. 1168, VOL. 45] 



three months, visiting Oahu and Kauai. Returning at 

 the end of the year, Townsend found the Prussian 

 naturalist Deppe at Honolulu, and with him passed 

 some time in the pursuit of natural history, visiting 

 most of the windward islands before he left in March 

 1837. Among the specimens obtained by Deppe for the 

 Berlin Museum were some of two species for which 

 Lichtenstein rightly established a new genus — the sin- 

 gular form Hemignathus — and, as it has since proved, 

 both these species were new, though he had, not un- 

 naturally, identified one of them with a species described 

 by Latham. Of Townsend's collection, a considerable 

 part was given to the Academy of Natural Sciences at 

 Philadelphia,! where it still remains ; but he sent several 

 specimens to Audubon, at that time, I believe, in Edin- 

 burgh, and he parted with them to Carfrae, a dealer 

 there, who sold them to the late Sir William Jardine, at 

 the dispersal of whose collection I was so fortunate as to 

 secure them — some of them bearing Townsend's label — 

 for the Museum of this University. If Townsend had 

 but published a list of his captures, he would indeed 

 have rendered a very good service ; but of course the 

 value of island-forms, to say nothing of the fact that 

 many of them were threatened with extirpation by 

 colonization and civilization, had not then been appre- 

 ciated, if even entertained, by naturalists. In the year 

 of Townsend's departure, the French frigate Venus, in 

 the course of her troublous career under Du Petit-Thouars, 

 arrived in the Sandwich Islands, with two naturalists, 

 Ldclancher and Neboux, on board ; and some years 

 later the atlas of plates illustrating the zoology of her 

 voyage appeared ; but the text was deferred for a 

 long while, and, indeed, was not completed till 1856. 

 Herein was figured and described, though not for the 

 first time, a third species of the curious Hemignathus. 

 In the meanwhile the celebrated expedition of Com- 

 modore Wilkes took place, and he, with some of his 

 ships, wintered there. In the course of their six months' 

 stay, the naturalists attached, Pickering and Peale, seem 

 to have made large collections ; but nearly all was lost 

 in the shipwreck of the Peacock, one of the ships of the 

 squadron. By 1848, Peale had completed his report on 

 the specimens of Mammals and Birds collected, and it 

 was printed off. A few copies only had been distributed, 

 when the rest were destroyed by fire. It was by no 

 means a bad performance ; and I cannot understand why 

 the late Mr. Cassin made so many changes in it when he, 

 ten years later, brought out a new edition of it. Some 

 of them (I speak only of those relating to the Sandwich 

 Island fauna) were certainly not improvements. How- 

 ever, a distinctly forward step was made by the Peale- 

 Cassin labours, and since few can obtain access to the 

 original work, I may mention that Dr. Hartlaub con- 

 siderately published an abstract of it,^ just as two years 

 later he did^ of the French "Voyage au Pole Sud," 

 wherein, having sorted out the different species observed 

 by various voyagers on the several Pacific groups, he 

 gave a useful list of those found on each, and thus he 

 assigned to the Sandwich Isles thirty species of birds, 

 marking two of them as doubtful. One of them is now 

 known to be rightly included, but the other must be 

 struck out, as well as, for one reason or another, four 

 more — leaving a total oi twenty -five, only sixteen oiv^\\\z\y 

 are Land-birds and only fourteen Passeres. 



Hitherto, no list of the birds of the Sandwich Isles 

 had been published, so that Dr. Hartlaub's met a great 

 want, though it had, of course, been possible, since 1814, 

 for anyone to pick out for himself the species assigned to 

 that group from the general list compiled by Tiedemann 



I In mentioning these facts, I desire to record my deep gratitude to the 

 authorities of both these Museums — Berlin and Philadelphia— for their 

 obliging readiness in allowing me to have these valuable specimens, one of 

 them unique, for examination. 



- Archiv/ilr Xatiirgeschichte, 1852, Hef'. i. pp. 93-138- 



'^ Journal Jilr Ornithologic, 1854, pp. 160-171. 



