Dublin Natural History Society. 4353 



time to literary pursuits, and the two latter had, by their observations, gained and 

 added much interesting information to the Zoology and Botany of that district. 



Mr. Williams said, that he had long and great experience in watching the 

 habits of water-fowl, and he did not consider that the shoveller had any peculiarity 

 in its feeding ; he observed it when swimming to skim the surface of the water with 

 its bill, but to eat potatoes and meal in common with others of the duck tribe. 



The Chairman remarked that the habits of birds in confinement could not be con- 

 sidered generally as the true mode of seeking and using food, as their wild state 

 influenced them. They more commonly adapted their habits to the use of the arti- 

 ficial food supplied to them. 



Mr. Andrews said that in the instance of a merganser, the strong serration of whose 

 mandibles in the wild state enabled it to retain the fish it captured, the serrated cha- 

 racter of the bill became blunt, and to some degree obliterated, by its change of food 

 in confinement. 



Mr. Kinahan was much interested in the remarks, particularly in that part where 

 the breeding of the birds in the country had been confirmed. It was very undesirable 

 to consider mere stragglers as natives. He had heard of the siskin breeding in sum- 

 mer in Powerscourt woods, also in Tipperary. Instances had been mentioned of the 

 black-capped warbler and the redwing breeding there. 



Reproduction and Distribution of the Smooth Newt. 



Mr. Kinahan then read the following paper " On the Reproduction and Distribu- 

 tion of the Smooth Newt, and a Notice of the Popular Superstitions relating to it.'' 



" Some years ago my attention was directed to these interesting animals, chiefly 

 with reference to the number of species found in and about Dublin. I was then so 

 fortunate as to have an opportunity of watching the progress of some of the earlier 

 stages o/ development of our only Dublin species, the smooth newt (Lissotriton punc- 

 tatus, Bell). Within the last few months my attention was again called to them by a 

 very interesting and valuable paper by Mr. J. Higginbottom, of Nottingham, in the 

 'Annals' for December, 1853, [see Zool. 4243]. In this paper, which is stated to be 

 the result of five years' close study, the author enters very fully into the habits and dis- 

 tinctions of the different species, corroborating for the most part the previous researches 

 of Rusconi in his 'Amours des Salamandres,' and of Professor Bell, in his excellent 

 treatise on ' British Reptiles,' and also adding much to our knowledge by researches 

 into what he calls their terrestrial stage. On reading this paper, I was struck with 

 several discrepancies between Mr. Higginbottom's observations and my own. Whe- 

 ther this arose from his observations having been made solely on the warty newt (Tri- 

 ton cristatus), on which point there is some ambiguity in his paper, and mine on the 

 smooth newt, or from some accidental cause, leaving others to decide, I shall content 

 myself with detailing what I saw, and pointing out the discrepancies between the con- 

 clusions arrived at by Mr. Higginbottom and the results of my own experiments. 



" On the 11th of May, 1851, I placed two smooth newts (L. punctatus), one a fe- 

 male, captured in the Bishop's Fields on the preceding day, the other a male, taken 

 some ten days previously, in a glass jar, four inches in diameter, and about eighteen 

 inches high ; this was filled with water to within a few inches of its summit, and had 

 floating in it a plant of the Indian pond-weed. On the 15th I found that the female 

 had deposited half-a-dozen eggs ; these were small, and made up of a round white 

 body, about the size of a grain of mustard-seed (which it much resembled), floating 



