326 Recently published Ornithological Works. 



Nat. Gescli. Land- en Volkenkunde.' The other numbers 

 are chiefly occupied with additions and corrections to the 

 author's ' Reference List to the Birds of Australia' (Nov. 

 Zool. xviii. 1912, p. 171), and in these articles he adds 

 several hundred more additional subspecies to the Australian 

 avifauna. 



We have already offered some critical remarks on 

 Mr, Mathews' methods in systematic ornithology, and it 

 may perhaps be mere iteration to repeat that we do not 

 approve of them. The subspecies described may be quite 

 worthy of subspecific differentiation, but what we maintain 

 is, that in describing them some sort of evidence of this 

 should be brought forward. 



On page 34 of the present number a new Osprey is 

 described as Pandion haliaetus melvillensis • it is said to 

 differ from P. h. cristatus in its whiter head and smaller size. 

 This is all the information given — no measurements either of 

 the typical or the new subspecies, nothing as to the number 

 of specimens examined or compared, and, in fact, it would 

 be quite impossible for any worker to confirm or reject 

 Mr. Mathews' new subspecies without access to his type. 

 This appears to us very hard on the Australian worker. In 

 tlie last number of the ' Record ' forty-seven new generic 

 names are proposed for Australian birds. Our remarks on 

 the subspecies apply almost equally to these generic names ; 

 the characters are in nearly all cases merely comparative, 

 and in our opinion of no great value for generic differen- 

 tiation. It appears to us that it would have been far better 

 to have waited until it was possible to give the limits of the 

 genera, and to indicate real diagnostic characters common to 

 each species included therein. 



Bird Notes. 



[Bird Notes: the Journal of tli« Foreign Bird Ckib, vol. iii. nos. 9-12, 

 Sept.-Dec. 1912.] 



Most of the articles in ' Bird Notes' are directly con- 

 cerned with aviculture, and are accounts of the experiences 

 of the authors in breeding or rearing birds in captivity, but 



