The Zoologist— August, 1874. 4105 



it many yards clown before again making its appearance. This it 

 did on two occasions. 



28th. Met with a great number of cuckoos near Launceston, and 

 saw more wood wrens. Observed missel thrushes to-day busily 

 engaged in eating ivy-berries. A gentleman who knows birds pretty 

 well assures me that he saw a splendid pair of adult roseate terns in 

 the Plymouth Sound about a week since, and that they came within 

 gunshot of him : their under parts were very rosy. This species 

 has now become exceedingly rare on our coasts. The lesser 

 blackbacked gulls have not yet left our harbours for their breeding- 

 stations. 



John Gatcombe. 



8, Lower Duroford Street, Stonehouse, Plymouth, 

 AprU 7, 1874 



Gigantic Squids. By Edward Newman. 



In the course of a long paper on the Crystal Palace Aquarium, 

 I ventured for the first time to express a doubt of the value of that 

 hypothesis of Science which denies to Nature the privilege of 

 producing crocodiles, snakes, and squids exceeding in length and 

 bulk those which are stowed away in the vaults of the British 

 Museum; and last year I further risked the publication of a paper 

 by Mr. Pryer giving the exact dimensions of an immense squid he 

 had seen and measured at Yokohama, in Japan, thus endeavouring 

 to remove the embargo from off this branch of scientific re- 

 search — to throw the trade in observation and discovery open to 

 the world. 



Mr. Saville Kent, in a contribution to No. 51 of the 'Popular 

 Science Review,' goes still more thoroughly into the subject, and 

 entirely exonerates the family of squids from that accusation of 

 sraallness which had been so lavishly and so unwisely heaped on 

 them by the magnates of science. Beginning with Aristotle, he 

 traces the history of these squids through the pages of Pliny, .■Elian, 

 Strabo, Fries, Olaus Magnus, Pontoppidan, Denys de Montfort, 

 Linneus, Pernetty, Molina, Peron, Quoy and Gaimard, Banks and 

 Solander, DeFerussac and d'Orbigny,Steeustrup, Harting, Allmaun, 

 Bouyer, Crosse and Fischer. Wisely eliminating the apocryphal, he 

 leaves untouched the reliable; in fact, adduces a mass of evidence 

 which it seems impossible to call in question, and theu descends 



