120 TEE ZOOLOGIST. 



Canvas-back (Nyroca vallisneria) . These birds never occur in 

 Australasia or Polynesia, and yet large nights of duck are said 

 to pass the Marshalls for days in autumn, going from north to 

 south and dropping stragglers to rest, while they return north in May. 

 The story is over ten years old, and a German one at that, published 

 in the ' Ornithologischer Monatsbericht ' ; but as the Marshalls are 

 now in our hands, we may expect ere long some evidence on the 

 subject from our own fellow-countrymen. 



EDITOEIAL NOTES. 



Odd Eyes in Ma?i, etc. — Such differences in the colour of the 

 two eyes in humanity as Miss Holloway records on p. 112 

 are rarely observed, but we can, curiously enough, record four 

 cases in which we have seen this abnormality. In 1892 we 

 saw a man, with dark hair and moustache, with one eye grey 

 and the other brown ; we did not note the variation again till 

 recently, when within the last few years we have seen a fair man 

 with the same peculiarity, and also a woman, the colour of whose hair 

 we did not notice. The last case that has occurred to us is that 

 of a little girl of eight we saw last year, whose hair was fair. In her, 

 as in the others, one eye was brown, the other being blue. One 

 " wall" — very pale blue — eye, in contrast to the normal brown, may 

 be seen in Dogs, Horses, and Babbits, and white Cats may have 

 one eye blue and the other green. Considering the great variability 

 in iris-colour in birds, it is rather curious to find odd eyes so rare 

 among them ; we have only noted one case, a red-and- white tame 

 Pigeon, with one brown eye and one white or " pearl " one. In this 

 case the two sides of the head were also marked differently, so that 

 different views of the bird gave the impression of two quite different 

 individuals ; but we noted no asymmetry other than that of eye- 

 colour in the human cases above referred to. "We have never noticed 

 any instances of odd-coloured eyes in reptiles, amphibians, or fishes. 



