Miscellaneous. 165 



ancestry to account for this fact. The authors are compelled to the 

 belief that there was once a time when Rodriguez, Mauritius, Bourbon, 

 Madagascar, and probably the Seychelles were connected by dry 

 land, and that that time is sufficiently remote to have permitted the 

 descendants of the original inhabitants of this now submerged conti- 

 nent to become modified into the many different representative forms 

 which are now known. Whether this result can have been effected" 

 by the process of "Natural Selection " must remain an open ques- 

 tion ; but that the Solitaire of Rodriguez, and the Dodo of Mauri- 

 tius, much as they eventually came to differ, sprang from one and 

 the same parent stock, seems a deduction so obvious, that the au- 

 thors can no more conceive any one fully acquainted with the facts 

 of the case hesitating about its adoption than that he can doubt the 

 existence of the Power by whom these species were thus formed. 



MISCELLAjSTEOUS. 



Note on the Existence of a large Pelican in the Turbaries of England. 



By A. Milne-Edwards. 



We know very little about the birds of which the remains are 

 found in turbaries, and hitherto their precise determination has 

 never been attempted. There would nevertheless be much interest 

 in such an examination, and in seeking what species of this class 

 inhabited our countries at the period when the beaver, the urus, the 

 aurochs, and the gigantic stag lived in great numbers in the forests 

 and on the banks of the watercourses. I have recently been able 

 to convince myself that investigations of this kind may furnish im- 

 portant results. 



The turbaries of the neighbourhood of Cambridge have furnished 

 a considerable number of the bones of birds, which Mr. Seeley and 

 Prof. Alfred Newton have been kind enough to submit to my exa- 

 mination. I was astonished to find among these remains the bone 

 of a pelican. This bone, which belongs to the Woodwardian Museum, 

 was obtained from the turbaries of the marshy districts (fenlands) 

 which cover the northern parts of the county of Cambridge. These 

 deposits have been studied with much care by Mr. Seeley, who, with 

 his usual obligingness, has furnished me with valuable information 

 upon the subject. 



Beneath peat in course of formation, of variable thickness, and 

 containing some freshwater shells and existing plants, there is a 

 clay filled with marine shells and containing some remains of marine 

 mammalia. This clay rests upon a bed of peat in which the trunks 

 of trees are met with, some of them still placed vertically. It is in 

 this layer that the bones of terrestrial animals occur ; and although 

 the exact position where the humerus of the pelican was collected 

 was not noticed, its colour and nature prove that it is derived from 

 this peaty deposit. The mammalia indicated as occurring in it 

 belong to the following species : — Bos frontosus, B. primigenius^ 

 Cervus megaceros, Ursus arctos, Lutra vulgaris, Canis lupus, Cervus 



