18 William Davies—Fossil Bird-remains of India. 
certainly through diminished mean temperature resulting from in- 
crease of extremes: but some minor causes act in the opposite direc- 
tion, and as yet nothing is known of quantitative effects. For the 
present, therefore, corroborative evidence may fairly be adduced, as 
is done by Dr. Croll in the cases of the present Antarctic Ice-cap and 
the supposed Inter-glacial periods. The discussion of these corrobo- 
rations is beyond the scope of the present article. 
I1T.—Own some Fossin Brro-Remarins From tHe Srwatrk Hrx1s IN 
THe British Museum. 
By Wiutuiam Daviss, F.G.S., 
of the Geological Department. 
(PLATE II.) 
HE first part of the “Records of the Geological Survey of India” 
for 1879 contains some interesting notes by Mr. R. Lydekker, 
B.A., descriptive of a “few fragmentary bird-remains ” recently 
obtained from the Tertiary deposits of the Siwaliks, and preserved in 
the Geological Museum at Calcutta. The subjects of most interest 
alluded to in this memoir are some bones referred to Dromeus, by 
Mr. Lydekker, and his remarks thereon, and upon some bones of 
kindred birds which form part of the extensive series of vertebrate 
remains collected in the same range of hills by the late Colonel Sir 
Proby 'T. Cautley, then Captain in the Bengal Artillery, and pre- 
sented by him to the National Collection.' 
These special fragments preserved in the above-named Museums 
are of great paleontological interest, for assuming Mr. Lydekker’s 
identification of the bones in the Indian Museum to be correct, the 
fact is fully established, that in the Upper Miocene or Lower Pliocene 
period, there lived contemporaneously in India two distinct forms of 
Struthioid birds, whose geographical habitats are, in the present day, 
widely separated: namely, the Ostrich in Africa and the Emu in 
Australia. The evidence as regards the Ostrich rests upon specimens 
in the National Collection which have never been described, and being 
but little known, a short description might usefully supplement, and 
also correct some misapprehensions regarding them contained in Mr. 
Lydekker’s notes. ; 
Commenting upon the rarity of avian remains in the Tertiaries of 
the Siwaliks, he remarks: “Some of these bones were collected by 
Dr. Falconer, and were deposited by him in the British Museum.” 
This is an error. They were collected and presented, as stated, by Col. 
Sir P. T. Cautley. Mr. Lydekker adds, “Figures being given of them 
‘ Most of these specimens were drawn on stone for the “Fauna Antiqua 
Sivalensis ” of Falconer and Cautley ; being one of a series of eighteen plates which — : 
were never printed for publication, and of which only one impression of each—a 
proof—has been preserved ; the drawings having, during Dr. Falconer’s lengthened 
absence in India, been erased from the stones. These impressions are deposited in 
the Geological Department of the British Museum; and explanations of the figures 
on each plate, which are respectively lettered A to R, are published in Dr. Falconer’s 
“* Paleontological Memoirs” (vol. i. pp. 538—d54), edited by the late Charles 
- Murchison, M.D., F.R.S. 
———— 
