228 Notices of Memoirs— 
over the whole of the Chatham Islands, lives a flightless species 
of rail of the genus (Cabalus) kin to the woodhens, but which is 
quite unknown in New Zealand, but strangely enough appears 
again in Lord Howe’s Island, far to the north-west, in the Tasman 
Sea. On the other hand, in the Antipodes, the Auckland, the 
Macquarrie, and the Campbell Islands, far to the south, we have 
birds such as the New Zealand woodhen, and a parrot belonging 
to the red-headed group (Cyanorhamphus) common both to the 
mainland and to the Chatham Islands, as well as many plants 
common to one or more of these southern islands, and to New 
Zealand or the Chatham Islands, proclaiming that these island 
specks are but the fragments protruding above the surface of the 
sea of a continent or continental island now broken up, and all 
but totally covered. 
It seems pretty certain therefore that ‘the Bampton shoal west 
of New Caledonia, and Lord Howe’s Island further south,’ and 
perhaps also New Caledonia and Fiji, formed the northern and 
western limits of this former extensive continental island, which 
almost certainly also extended east to the Chatham Islands, and 
most probably south and east to the Macquarrie and the Antipodes 
Islands which we may name Antipodea. 
Now turning for a little to another quarter of the globe, to the 
region of the Mascarene Islands, we find that Francois Leguat, the 
French Huguenot emigrant from Hurope to South Africa, who lived 
in several of these islands, and recorded with great exactness all 
that he suffered and all that he saw in his “Voyage.” He 
specially describes the solitaire, a great flightless pigeon, and also 
a woodhen, or gelinote, with a red beak and red borders to its 
eyes. Remains of this bird have been discovered along with those of 
the solitaire, and have been determined to belong to a great species 
of rail, nearly related to the woodhens of New Zealand. From its 
hostility to red the generic name of Erythromachus has been applied 
to it. 
The Island of Mauritius, 95 miles to the south-west, was inhabited 
by the great dodo (Didus ineptus), which was also a gigantic flight- 
less pigeon, living on the ground. It was a very near relative of 
the solitaire, as was finally proved by an examination of the large 
collection of its bones received in Hurope in 1866, among which 
there were several of another bird then unknown, and which con- 
tinued to be so till the year 1868, when Herr von Frauenfeld 
discovered in the library of the Emperor of Austria the picture 
of a remarkable bird, a tall crane or woodhen, so closely agreeing 
with the description of the gelinote given by Leguat as to leave no 
doubt as to its identity. The bones found mixed with those of the 
dodo turned out unquestionably to belong to this fine woodhen, 
which was named Aphanapteryx. Both birds, however, were of the 
closest kin to each other, and must have had a common ancestor; 
but their nearest relatives elsewhere are the wekas, or woodhens, of 
New Zealand. At the present day there are no birds in either 
Rodriguez or Mauritius nearly related to the Ocydromine group of 
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