General Notes. 149 



3. Oidemia perspicillata, Fleming. Surf-Duck. " One specimen, 

 immature, piocuied May 3, 1876. It was observed in company with 

 ' Black Jacks ' {Fuliyula affinis)". 



Mr. Hiirtur also writes that he took a fine specimen of the Purple 

 Gallinule {Porphyrio martinica) at the same locality, April 18, 1877. 

 These birds are now all preserved in Mr. Hurtur's collection, which em- 

 braces nearly all the species comnron to the vicinity of St. Louis. — J. A. 

 Allen, Cambridge, Mass. 



The Carolinian Fauna. — In Mr. E. P. Bicknell's excellent paper on 

 southern birds occurring at Riverdale, N. Y. (see this number of the Bul- 

 letin, pp. 128- 132), I am pleased to find so strong a confirmation of what I 

 ventured to write in 1871 (when the accessible data bearing on the subject 

 of the northern boundary of the Carolinian Fauna were much fewer than 

 now), namely: "On the Atlantic coast this fauna [Carolinian] includes 

 Long Island and a small portion of Southeastern New York, which form 

 its northern limit." I also enumerated thirty-two species as being in a 

 general way "limited in their northward range" by this fauna, adding 

 that a few of them occur also " as stragglers in the Alleghanian Fauna." * 

 These thirty-three species include not only those enumerated by Mr. Bick- 

 nell, but also many others equally characteristic of the Carolinian Fauna. 



Boundaries between faunae cannot of course be drawn trenchantly ; 

 there must be a slight overlapping of northern and sonthern species, re- 

 sulting in a debatable or transitional narrow belt between two contiguous 

 faunae where neither are typically developed. As Mr. H. A. Purdie stated 

 in 1873, "no part of New England has been embraced within the Caro- 

 linian Fauna, and properly so, but that its southern border has a tinge of 

 it is quite evident."! While no part of Connecticut is perhaps tyj)ically 

 Carolinian, its southern border, especially about the mouth of the Con- 

 necticut River, is so strongly tinged with it that it may be regarded as 

 doubtful whether it is not as much Carolinian as" Alleghanian. % Several 

 of the Carolinian birds, in certain years at least, straggle northward, 

 especially in the valley of the Connecticut, to Massachusetts, while sowe 

 are of quite regular appearance, in very small numbers, as far northw«^l<i 

 and eastward as Essex County. Yet they are too few in numbe?^ m<X too 

 uncertain in their occurrence to form a characteristic eleaie^Ut of 'the 

 fauna. 



In the opening paragraph of Mr. Bicknell's paper he refers to the limi-- 

 tation of faunae and florae as being " to a certain extent uncomform.able 



* Bull. Mas. Comp. Zobl., Vol II, pp. 393, S94, April, 1871. 



t Amer. Nat., Vol. VI 1, p. 693, Novenilw, 1873. 



X This " tinge" in Southern Connecticut, and in fact in the extreme south, 

 eastern (maritime) portions of New England generally, is especially shown by the 

 distribution of reptiles, where several southern species are sparingly represeutecl 

 which do not occur at all at more northerly localities. 



