336 Recent Ornithological Publications. 



our author does the ' Ibis ' the honour of borrowing, and occa- 

 sionally misquoting, without any acknowledgment of the chan- 

 nel through which Professor Reinhardt made known his re- 

 searches to the public, the facts and inferences contained in that 

 learned naturalist^s paper " On the Birds of Greenland," which 

 appeared in the former series of this journal (Ibis, 1861, 

 pp. 1-19). 



The recently published part of the ' Transactions of the Zoo- 

 logical Society ' contains in full Professor Owen^s paper " On the 

 Skeleton of Aha impennis," giving the first account of the oste- 

 ology of that interesting bird yet published. The materials from 

 which this memoir is drawn up were chiefly furnished by the 

 natural "mummy" we were so fortunate, through the kind 

 aid of the Bishop of Newfoundland [cf. P. Z. S. 1863, p. 435), 

 as to be able to place in the Professor's hands, supplemented in 

 several important parts, which are wanting in our own specimen, 

 by bones we obtained in Iceland, and others extracted with sin- 

 gular skill by Mr. John Hancock from a preserved skin in his 

 possession. As Professor Owen is confessedly the greatest de- 

 scriptive anatomist of the day, we need say nothing of the man- 

 ner in which he has described the skeleton of the Gare-Fowl ; but 

 we regret to find that the plates, two in number, which accom- 

 pany the paper are not sufliciently illustrative of the bird's oste- 

 ology. It appears to us that figures showing in detail the com- 

 parative lengths of the wing-bones in the Great Auk and its 

 near relative Alca torda might have been introduced to advantage, 

 and especially a full-sized representation of the coracoid, that 

 most important bone in the ornithic skeleton, which in the only 

 plate in which it is delineated at all is nearly half concealed by 

 the humerus. 



Many of our readers will doubtless not be aware of the ex- 

 istence of a revived series of ' The Naturalist ' *, "a boat which " 

 (we quote from the address prefixed to its first number) " has 



* The Naturalist, Journal of the West-Riding Consolidated Naturalists' 

 Society, and Manual of Exchange in all Departments of Natural History. 

 London: 1864, Nos. 1-16. 



