THE ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 147 



abounds. Their death is frequently accelerated by the silliness which 

 characterises most of their actions : observing men carry heavy burthens 

 through the forest, they tear off the largest branches from the trees, and 

 accumulating a weight (sometimes of elephants' teeth), disproportionate 

 even to their superior strength, emulously hurry with it from one part of 

 the woods to another, with little or no cessation, until the fatigue and the 

 want of rest and nourishment exhausts them. Amongst other of their 

 actions, reported without variation by the men, women, and children of 

 Empoongwa [M pong we] and Sheekan, is that of building a house in rude 

 imitation of the natives, and sleeping outside or on the roof of it ; and also 

 of carrying about their infant dead, closely pressed to them, until they drop 

 away in putrefaction.* 



Some of Mivart's best work is to be found in these volumes. 

 About forty papers stand to the credit of Dr. Murie, the first 

 Prosector ; some of these were of a pathological and others of a 

 physiological character. Abstracts of Owen's memoirs, published 

 in the Transactions, appeared here. Kitchen Parker was a 

 contributor, and his account of the Sternal Apparatus of Birds 

 and other Vertebrates f was afterwards expanded into a mono- 

 graph on the Structure and Development of the Shoulder- 

 Girdle.t 



Salvin alone, and in collaboration with the Secretary, did a 

 good deal of work on South American birds. Two papers, 

 compiled at the Gardens, and presented by Dr. Sclater, who 

 added some notes, deserve mention — the first, in 1868, dealt 

 with the breeding of mammals in the Gardens during the 

 preceding twenty years ; the other, in the following year, with 

 the breeding of birds for a similar period. Mr. Sharpe con- 

 tributed fourteen papers, of which those on kingfishers and 

 swallows were the drafts, so to speak, of monographs on the 

 respective families. Swinhoe added considerably to our know- 

 ledge of the Chinese fauna, and there were a dozen papers from 

 Wallace on the birds of the Malay Archipelago. 



The fourth volume of Transactions, published in 1862, con- 

 tained twenty-four papers, the most important being those of 



* T. E. Bowdich : " Mission to Ashantee," pp. 440-441 (London, 1819). 



t One of the chief results of this work was, by demonstrating the true homo- 

 logies of the various bones of the shoulder-girdle in fishes, to overthrow, once for 

 all, Owen's theory of the nature of limbs. — T. JefEery Parker : William Kitchen 

 Parker, p. 44. 



t Ray Society, 1888. 



