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EDITORIAL GLEANINGS. 



We read in a recent number of the ' Athenseum ' : — " Not content 

 with his immense Shakespearian labours, Dr. Horace Howard Furness 

 has caught the largest recorded Tarpon (246 lb.), landing his fish in 

 thirty minutes, and returning it, like a sportsman, to the water as 

 being inedible." 



[Tarpon atlanticus is now a well-known fish to those anglers who can 

 follow their craft on another continent. Jordan and Evermann gives 

 its range as " Long Island to Brazil," and its weight as from 30 to 

 110 pounds ('Fishes of North and Middle America,' p. 409). Ever- 

 mann and Marsh, however, in their Report on ' The Fishes of Porto 

 Rico,' state that this fish reaches a weight of " 30 to more than 300 

 pounds. The largest one recorded as taken on a hook weighed 

 209 pounds, and the largest taken with the harpoon weighed 383 

 pounds, if we may believe the record ; but examples weighing over 

 100 pounds are not often seen." — Ed.] 



A month in a lighthouse should be an experience in the life of any- 

 one, but more especially of an ornithologist, versed in and still studying 

 the migration of birds. Mr. W. Eagle Clarke passed the time between 

 the 18th of September and the 19th of October in the Eddystone 

 Lighthouse, and his ornithological observations have recently been 

 published in the ' Ibis.' It is obviously impossible to condense the 

 information given in this paper to the dimensions of our present space, 

 but we notice an interesting and apparently unrecorded fact, that the 

 Herring-Gull feeds exclusively on seaweed, especially on the kind 

 known as "sea-thongs" (Himanthalia lorea). The "mesmeric in- 

 fluence " of the light was found to exercise its greatest force on the 

 Starling, and, after that bird, on the Sky-Lark. The prevalence of 

 rain is evidently a matter of indifference to migratory birds, but the 

 presence of fog has a contrary effect, though this may be largely due 

 to the noise made by the explosions of tonite which takes place every 

 five minutes on the lighthouse during a foar. 



An egg of the Moa was recently offered for sale at the well-known 

 London Auction Rooms. The ' Daily Chronicle ' has printed an in- 

 teresting paragraph anent this egg : — 



" Messrs. Arthur G. Eve and Co., Australian merchants, write to 



