422 THE ZOOLOGIST. 
They would then be on their autumn migration, and in all pro- 
bability were driven out of their course by the agency of adverse 
winds. In a great majority of cases the occurrenge of American 
birds in England has been in the autumnal months. The clue to 
this, as Prof. Baird has remarked, will be found in a study of the 
laws of the winds of the northern hemisphere, as developed by the 
late Prof. Henry and Prof. Coffin.* 
One or two points in connection with Mr. Crampton’s Snow 
Goose deserve to be noted. The facility with which the bird 
became domesticated is remarkable, although this is not an isolated 
instance. Dr. Elliott Coues, in his ‘ Birds of the North West’ 
(p. 551), quotes an account given by Mr. Ridgway of a Snow 
Goose, Anser hyperboreus, which had voluntarily become semi- 
domesticated at Mount Carmel, Illinois, and lived with a flock of 
tame geese for nearly a year. The bird had been crippled in the 
wing the preceding fall, but the wound, which was merely in the 
muscles, soon healed, and it escaped by flight. It flew about half 
a mile, and observing a flock of tame geese upon the grassy 
commons between. the town and the river, alighted among them. 
It continued to stay with them, going home with the flock regularly 
every evening to be fed and enclosed in the barn-yard. 
Another point to which attention may be directed is the singular 
form of the bill in this bird. The edges of each mandible have 
twenty-three indentations, or teeth as it were, on each side—a 
peculiarity specially noticed in Mr. Crampton’s bird by Mr. Sweet- 
man. ‘The inside or concavity of the upper mandible has also 
seven lateral rows of projecting teeth, and the tongue, which is 
horny at the extremity, is armed on each side with thirteen long 
and sharp bony teeth, placed like those of a saw, with their points 
directed backwards. The design and use of these conspicuous 
lamelle (common to other geese, but remarkably developed in this 
one) become evident when we know the bird’s food and its manner 
of procuring it. It feeds, says Dr. Elliott Coues,t upon reeds, 
grasses, and other herbs, which it forcibly pulls up by the roots, or 
twitches in two. The shape and singular armature of the bill thus 
admirably adapt it for seizing and retaining firm hold of yielding 
plant-stems. 
* See remarks on the occurrence in England of the American Red-breasted 
Thrush, ‘ Zoologist,’ 1877, p. 16. 
+ ‘Birds of the North-West,’ p. 552. 
