PREFACE. IX 



was a mere chance, and nothing is more likely than that sealers or 

 settlers should kill and eat so palatable a fowl and leave its bones for 

 naturalists to ponder over. Every one is acquainted with those who 

 do not know our commonest British birds from each other, and some 

 would surely only recognise in the Notornis (supposing them emi- 

 grants to its distant habitation) a fowl goodly to look on and pleasant 

 to the taste; it could not by any possibility occur to them that such a 

 bird would cause an excitement amongst the learned greater than the 

 discovery of a planet. 



Connected with birds, I must not pass silently over the valuable 

 papers by Mr. Tomes on the supposed new Shrike, (Zool. 2650 and 

 2734) in the latter of which that gentleman announces it as his own 

 and Mr. Yarrell's opinion that the bird under consideration is Lanius 

 Excubitorides of Swainson, described in the ' Fauna Boreali-Ameri- 

 cana,' ii. 115, and figured in pi. 34. I am aware that any opinion I 

 may offer in opposition to that of such a distinguished author as Mr. 

 Yarrell, and such a close and pains-taking observer as Mr. Tomes, is 

 not very likely to influence the readers of the - Zoologist ; ' yet inas- 

 much as a citation of these opinions without comment seems to imply 

 a kind of concurrence therein, I think it will be the more honest 

 course for me to say that I am very far from being convinced that we 

 have two species of gray shrike in this country, and that I consider 

 the differences recorded indicative of age or season rather than of 

 species. I may also observe that the character chiefly insisted on by 

 Swainson, as distinguishing Excubitor from Excubitorides, the en- 

 tireness or division of the posterior scale of the tarsus, is a difference 

 not found to exist in the British specimens, which uniformly, as far as 

 my observation has extended, possess the characters assigned by 

 Swainson to Excubitor. 



Another subject of interest, also connected with Ornithology, is the 

 extraordinary and, I believe, unparalleled immigration of Waxwings, 

 which took place in the winter of 1849 — 50. By a reference to the 

 Index, under the head " Waxwing," it will be seen that a great num- 

 ber of records occur in these pages ; but it is neither consistent with 

 fact, nor fair to other journalists, to assume that these records furnish 

 vni. b 



