230 Proceedings of the Royal Physical Society. 
being taken up by planters and others, the noble bird should 
be rigorously protected, or it will as surely soon become 
extinct as the Emus of Tasmania and Kangaroo Island. It 
has been suggested that the large scrub-clad island of 
Hinchinbrook, adjacent to the mainland, be a reserve for the 
perpetual protection of Cassowaries. A more suitable place 
for the purpose could not well be found. 
Really little is yet known of the habits of the Cassowary— 
a great bird full of speculative interest to naturalists, inas- 
much as it is supposed to be one of the living representatives, 
or, perhaps, the surviving contemporary of such large extinct 
birds as the Moas of New Zealand. The Australian Casso- 
wary was first discovered by the late Thomas Wall, naturalist 
to the expedition commanded by the ill-fated explorer 
Kennedy, and was described as Caswarius australis in the 
Sydney Morning Herald, 3rd June 1854. The second speci- 
men was shot, September 1866, by Mr R. Johnson, Inspector 
of Police—now Police Magistrate, Queensland. The bird is 
still called in some parts of that colony Johnson’s Cassowary. 
Dr E. P. Ramsay, in the Proceedings of the Zoological 
Society for 1876, furnishes an exceedingly interesting account 
of the Cassowary. 
I fully concur with Dr Ramsay’s remarks about the 
wariness and shyness of the Cassowary, and repeated his 
experience by returning without a specimen, although my 
companions and myself endeavoured persistently to obtain a 
bird in the flesh, which we wanted fora museum. Once we 
divided our party for a week—two proceeding 20 miles in 
one direction, and two a like distance in an opposite direc- 
tion. Frequently we noticed the bird’s fresh tracks by the 
banks of streams, but at the end of our appointed time we 
returned to our starting-point (camp) without “yun-gun,” as 
the aboriginals call the Cassowary, or in pigeon-English, 
“ big-fellow chookie-chookie.” 
A considerate selector (i.¢.,a person who selects and dwells 
upon the land under Government regulations), hoping to do 
us a service, brought us a mangled skin, which had every 
appearance of having been skinned with his axe. 
It is difficult to understand how such a bulky bird as the 
