200 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



in his work on ' British Birds,' to the effect that the Dunlin 

 breeds on the mountains of the Lake district — a statement which 

 has been already contradicted on good authority. 



Among the species included in the European avifauna, but 

 hitherto unrecorded from any British locality, are the Terek 

 Sandpiper (considered by our author, in spite of its recurved 

 bill, to be an arctic form of the Common Sandpiper) ; the Mediter- 

 ranean Curlew (tenuirostris) , distinguishable by its short tarsus, 

 striated crown, and pure white axillaries, and breeding as far 

 north as 50° in Russia ; and the Marsh Sandpiper (stagnatilis), 

 appropriately named by Jerdon the Little Greenshank, which has 

 been obtained at Heligoland. 



The rarer species described include the Asiatic Erman's 

 Sandpiper (of which only half-a-dozen specimens are extant), and 

 the still rarer Magellanic Plover, Charadrius sociabilis. This last 

 was discovered in the Straits of Magellan nearly fifty years ago, 

 but the type preserved in the Paris Museum, with another 

 obtained for the British Museum at the same time, remained 

 unique until 1886, when Mr. John Young fell in with a flock of 

 five or six, and secured one of them, on a rocky point in Tova 

 harbour, on the coast of Patagonia, in lat. 45° South. 



Another curious species is the Wry-billed Plover of New 

 Zealand, of which Mr. Harting gave so full an account in ' The 

 Ibis' for 1869. This bird is remarkable for the fact that the 

 bill invariably curves considerably to the right — a peculiarity 

 which we are assured is quite perceptible even in the downy 

 young. 



Apropos of New Zealand, another fact of interest chronicled 

 from that colony is that many of the museums in New Zealand 

 possess apparent hybrids between the Black Oystercatcher (uni- 

 color) and the Pied (longirostris), which intermediate forms are 

 supposed to be unfertile. 



The beautifully coloured plates (twenty-one in number) by 

 Keulemans, and the numerous woodcuts which adorn the volume, 

 add materially to its utility and value. 



