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THE NIDOLOOIST 147 
cases of Raineism—the Simon pure article—all 
having been perpetrated by Mr. Walter Raine (of 
Toronto, Canada) himself, and covered all over 
with his ‘‘trade-marks.’’ 
As representative of perhaps not the worst class 
of cases we have this: Mr. Raine sells a set of 
eggs of the American Scoter to Mr. E. R. Schrage 
of Pontiac, Michigan, accompanied by the origi- 
nal label in Raine’s own handwriting, stating that 
these eggs were collected on the south-west coast 
of Greenland on June 19, 1889. The question is: 
Were they? Up to the present time it is not 
known to naturalists that the American Scoter 
ever bred in Greenlan!, and in his work, ‘‘The 
‘Birds of Greenland,” Mr. Andreas T. Hagerup 
does not give that Duck as occurring there, and 
his memoir appeared in Boston in 189r. 
This is an example of Raineism, wherein a false 
locality is attached to the specimens with the view 
of having them sell better as an unusual set, or at 
least as a set collected upon an extralimital range. 
But I now come to aclass of cases ofa far bolder 
and at the same time ofa more flagrant type. 
These are cases of downright fraud, and as such 
are fully deserving of the most severe denuncia- 
tion that American Oologists can mete out to 
them, Every one of these cases are easily traced 
directly to Raine’s own personal fraudulent opera- 
tions, and are of comparatively recent occurrence. 
During the early part of last April (1896), Mr. 
Raine sold to Mr. E. Arnold of Battle Creek, 
Mich., two eggs of what he represented to be eggs 
of the Little Brown Crane (Grus canadensis), the 
set being accompanied by a large data-label filled 
outin Mr. Raine’s own handwriting. A photo- 
graph of this labelis’here given, and it will be 
seen that these eggs are purported to have been 
collected at Duck Lake, Saskatchewan, North- 
west Canada. Upon measuring these eggs at the 
United States Natioval Museum, with an instru- 
ment of the most recent and improved pattern, 
divided to one-hundredths of an inch, I find them 
to measure respectively: 3.49 x 2.08 and 3.32 x 
2.01, 
Now in the collecticns of the United States 
National Museum at Washington, D. C., there are 
at this writing sixteen specimens of eggs of the 
Little Brown Crane (G. canadensis), and these are 
all from Northern Alaska and Northern British 
America, none having been found breeding south 
of Great Slave Lake. 
Upon carefully measuring these eggs, the fol- 
lowing results were obtained, viz.: 3.68 x 2.26, 
3.66 x 2.16, 3.47 x 2.26, 3.96 x 2.23, 3.64 x 2.17, 3.41 
X 2.28, 3.65 x 2.30, 3.54 x 2.26, 3.26 x 2.35, 3.54 x 
2.25, 3.83 X 2.10, 3.54 X 2.33, 3-73 X 2.24, 3-73 X 2.18, 
3.45 X 2.31, and 3.75 x 2.29—which it will be seen 
gives an average of 3.61 8-16 x 2 24 13-16, or prac- 
tically 3.61 x 2.25. 
So that the eggs sold to Mr. Arnold by Raine as 
eggs of the Little Brown Crane are considerably 
below the average for the size of the eggs of that 
bird. In his ‘‘Bird-Nesting in North-west Canada”’ 
Mr. Raine gives a colored figure of an egg of the 
Little Brown Crane, not stating where the speci- 
‘men was obtained, and it measures 3.65 x 2.27, 
and it probably represents an egg of that species. 
But now to the egg he sold Mr. Arnold again, 
They are very small for eggs of the Little Brown. 
Crane—so small, indeed, that the suspicion arose 
that possibly they were eggs of the Little Demoi- 
selle Crane of Europe, the species well known to 
science as Grus virgo. There are three specimens 
of the eggs of Grus virgo in the collections of the 
United States National Museum, and they meas- 
ure respectively 3.29 x 2.16, 3.37 x 2.14and 3.16 x" 
2.02. Seebohm, in his ‘‘History of British Birds’’ 
(Vol. II, 1884, p. 577), says of the eggs of Grus 
virgo that they ‘‘vary in length from 3.8 to 3.1 
inch; and in breadth from 2.2 to 2.0 inch.’’ In 
short, of the nineteen species of Cranes now 
known to naturalists, none lay eggs as small as 
those laid by Grus virgo,—or, in other words, it 
lays the smallest eggs of any known Crane. 
The doubt that arcse from an examination and 
comparison of these eggs in the Arnold collection 
was greatly enhanced when another set of two 
was sent to the National Museum for identifica- 
tion. These also came with Raine’s original data- 
label, in his own handwriting (see photograph 
herewith), and claimed to have been collected 
(June 2, 1891) at Big Grass Marsh, Manitoba. He 
is also careful to point out on the label that they 
are the set known as ‘‘Set IV,” and described in 
his ‘‘Bird-Nesting in North-west Canada”’ on page 
167. These eggs were received at the Museum 
early in May (1896), and belonged to Mr. Albert 
H.Frost of NewYork City. One of them measured 
3.48 x 2.11, and the other 3.39 x 2.15. Upon com- 
paring these figures with the measurements given 
by Raine in his book for the same eggs, we find 
there that he states that they measure 3.47 x 2.09 
and 3.38 x 2.18. In any event they are consider- 
ably smaller than the average eggs of Grus cana- 
densts for which they were sold, and my examina- 
