•854 Letters, Extracts, and Notes. 



Scotia/^ By enclosing the words " and other islands " in 

 parentheses and follovving them with a question mark, 

 Mr. Kidgway has made it perfectly clear that what he 

 intended to signify was merely that there may he — not 

 certainly are — breeding stations other than the only known 

 one, a possibility which cannot be denied and hence should 

 not be wholly ignored^ despite ever accumulating negative 

 evidence that tends ever more and more strongly to discredit 

 it. Such uncertainty has practically ceased to exist, 

 however, as regards Grand Manan, for the avifauna of 

 that island — which, by the way, lies not " off Nova Scotia"" 

 in the usual sense of the term, but on the opposite side of 

 the Bay of Fundy, within sight of the coast of Maine — has 

 been very carefully investigated within recent years by 

 several excellent field ornithologists, who report that the 

 Savanna Sparrow is apparently the only species of Passer- 

 culus which occurs there in summer. 



I am. Sir, 



Yours &c., 



William Brewster. 



Cambridge, Massachusetts, 

 6 December, 1913. 



Sir, — I desire to direct the attention of ornithologists to 

 a memoir upon the peroneal muscles of birds published in 

 the December part of the ' Proceedings of the Zoological 

 Society.' The author. Dr. P. Chalmers Mitchell, describes 

 those muscles in a large number of birds belonging to all of 

 the chief groups, and deduces therefrom a table in which 

 the main variations of the muscles are illustrated in a 

 graphic form. 



While it may be useful to possess within the compass of a 

 few pages the principal variations of these, after all, rather 

 well-known muscles, it is entirely opposed to the methods 

 adopted universally by zoologists to ignore to so large an 

 extent, as has Dr. Mitchell, the work of previous observers. 



Dr. Mitchell rightly allows to Dr. Gadow the credit of 

 having contributed the most considerable account extant 



