INTRODUCTION. XV 



naturalists, Leclancher and Neboux, on board ; and some years later the atlas of plates 

 illustrating the zoology of her voyage appeared, but the text was deferred for a long 

 while, and, indeed, was not completed till 1856. Herein was figured and described, 

 though not for the first time, a species of the curious Hemignathus. 



" In the meanwhile the celebrated expedition of Commodore Wilkes took place, and 

 he, with some of his ships, wintered there. In the course of their six months' stay, the 

 naturalists attached, Pickering and Peale, seem to have made large collections; but 

 nearly all was lost in the wreck of the ' Peacock,' one of the ships of the squadron. 

 By 1848 Peale had completed his report on the specimens of mammals and birds col- 

 lected, and it was printed off. A few copies only had been distributed, when the rest 

 were destroyed by fire. It was by no means a bad performance ; and I cannot under- 

 stand why the late Mr. Cassin made so many changes in it when he, ten years later, 

 brought out a new edition of it. Some of them (I speak only of those relating to the 

 SandAvich Island fauna) were certainly not improvements. However, a distinctly 

 forward step was made by the Peale-Cassin labours ; and since few can obtain access to 

 the original work, I may mention that Dr. Hartlaub considerately published an abstract 

 of it \ just as two years later he did 2 of the French ' Voyage au Pole Sud,' wherein, 

 having sorted out the different species observed by various voyagers on the several 

 Pacific groups, he gave a useful list of those found on each, and thus he assigned to the 

 Sandwich Isles thirty species of birds, marking two of them as doubtful. One of them 

 is now known to be rightly included, but the other must be struck out, as well as, for 

 one reason or another, four more — leaving a total of twenty -five, only sixteen of which 

 are Land-birds and only fourteen Passeres. 



"Hitherto no list of the birds of the Sandwich Isles had been published, so that 

 Dr. Hartlaub's met a great want, though it had of course been possible, since 1814, for 

 anyone to pick out for himself the species assigned to that group from the general list 

 compiled by Tiedemann (' Anatomie und Naturgeschichte der Vogel,' ii. pp. 426-436), 

 and in like manner, since 1859, from Mr. G. E. Gray's useful ' Catalogue of the Birds 

 of the Tropical Islands of the Pacific Ocean,' printed by order of the Trustees of the 

 British Museum; but the former was obsolete, and the latter, as we now know, very 

 erroneous 3 . Mr. Gray's references shew him to have been as usual a model of accuracy, 

 but his judgment as an ornithologist was frequently at fault. 



"It was therefore with great pleasure that, some time in the winter of 1870-71, 

 I received a copy of a ' Synopsis of the Birds hitherto described from the Hawaiian 

 Islands,' which had been communicated in February 1869 to the Boston Society of 

 Natural History by Mr. Dole, a resident in those islands, and had been published 

 in the Society's 'Proceedings' (xii. pp. 294-309); and Mr. Sclater, who I knew 



1 " Archiv fiir Naturgeschichte, 1852, Heft i. pp. 93-138." 



2 "Journal fiir Oruithologie, 1854, pp. 160-171." 



3 " Many of its worst errors are doubtless due to the loss, before mentioned, of the type specimens, which had 

 been suffered by the Museum long before Mr. G. R. Gray was connected with it. Latham, in 1821, had already 

 lamented their decay." 



c2 



