9188 Birds. 
I hoped to see examples of the curious variety of the blackcap (Cur- 
guca Heinekeni, Sard. & Selby) and other Madeiran birds alive. Un- 
fortunately the doctor was not at home, and, what made it worse, had 
the key of his pets with him. Then, following my companions, we 
went on board ship; and about an hour after sunset, amid the blaze 
of blue lights, the “Tamar” steamed away, and Madeira vayjshed 
into a memory. 
ALFRED NEWTON.* 
Elveden, February 28, 1863. 
Struthionidous Birds, Extinct and Recent. 
Tue former existence of huge struthionidous birds in several and 
distant localities is one of those facts which, at first received with 
hesitation and doubt, have of late years forced themselves on our 
notice, and made themselves part and parcel of the science of Natural 
History. There is much teaching in the assured discovery that the 
magnitude of the species constituting a family or order was at some, 
and perhaps not very remote, period, vastly superior to what it is at 
the present time: this fact, now clearly established, receives additional 
importance from the cognate fact that the larger animals still lingering 
on the earth are gradually disappearing even while we are speculating 
on the subject, and are undergoing the inevitable process of being 
removed from the category of things that are into the catalogue of 
things that were. Yet in almost every instance these colossal creatures 
have left representatives behind them which serve as guides to their 
systematic arrangement; thus Colossochelys is represented by Tes- 
tudo, Iguanodon by Iguana, and the crocodile in the oolite of Poictiers, 
estimated by Valenciennes to have been at least a hundred feet in 
length, has its likeness stamped on the comparative lilliputian which 
still floats log-like on the waters of the Nile. As with reptiles, so 
with sucklers: the Megatherium is represented by the diminutive 
sloth: the mammoths and mastodons of earlier ages are brought vividly 
before us by our living elephant. Again, among birds the dodo is 
said to be typified by Didunculus, Zpyornis by the ostrich, Dinornis 
by the cassowary and mouruk. It requires neither the research nor 
the imagination of a Darwin to accept the teaching which these facts 
* Reprinted from the ‘Ibis, April, 1863, and obligingly communicated by the 
author. 
