

Before doing anything else it was necessary to ascertain, if possible, which was the 

 species originally described by Latham as the " Sandwich Flycatcher," from a specimen 

 in the collection of Sir Joseph Banks. Though this specimen had, of course, long ago 

 perished, it must have been obtained during Cook's voyage, and therefore either on 

 Kauai or Hawaii — but the latter preferably, since his ships made the longest stay there, 

 and we know that most of the birds they brought home were procured there, while 

 Latham's description, on which was founded the Muscicapa sandwichensis of Gmelin, 

 does not ill accord with the younger stage of the Hawaiian bird. But Latham also 

 described, as belonging to a second species, which he called the " Spotted-winged 

 Flycatcher," a specimen in the Leverian Museum " Supposed to inhabit the Sandwich 

 Islands" and now wholly lost to sight, for I have failed to find any mention of it, by 

 which it could be traced, in the sale-catalogue of that collection. This, being the 

 foundation of Gmelin's Muscicapa maculata, has been generally regarded as specifically 

 identical with the other, and I am certainly not in a position to urge a contrary view ; 

 but since it may possibly have been a Kauaian example, I think it better to exclude 

 from the already complicated synonymy of Chasiempis sandvicensis any reference to 

 this second species, which after all may have been something very different, since its 

 having come from the Sandwich Islands was only a matter of supposition ; and, even if 

 its locality could be proved, the name given to it by Gmelin is forestalled. 



Pursuing my investigation I found little help obtainable from collections or books. 

 The meagre list of Bloxam included Muscicapa sandwichensis, the specific name being 

 wrongly assigned, as was the fashion in those days, to Linnaeus instead of Gmelin, but 

 rightly identified with the " Elepaio " (or TLrepeio as the word was then written) of the 

 natives. Nothing more, however, was said of it, though Bloxam obtained specimens of 

 at least one of the species, which were in the British Museum so lately as 1868 ; but 

 none seem to have been procured by the naturalists of the French or the United States' 

 expeditions, and evidence is wanting that any ornithological author, the late Mr. G. B,. 

 Gray excepted, had examined an example until, in 1847, Prof. Cabanis founded upon 

 Latham's species the genus Chasiempis, though he, as has since been shown by 

 Mr. Sclater, had not specimens of the true sandvicensis to examine, but only those, 

 collected by Deppe, of the species which inhabits Oahu. In 1850 Beichenbach (Natiirl. 

 System der Vogel, p. lxvii) gave an outline of the head, wing, and foot of the new 

 genus, but these figures are not particularly discriminative. The rarity of this form in 

 collections and the little that was known of it is shown by the fact that, in 1862, so 

 skilful an ornithologist as Mr. Sclater referred (though with doubt) a specimen of it 

 which had passed under the practised eye of Verreaux to a genus of a wholly different 

 family. In 1882 Mr. Pudgway, on receiving specimens of Chasiempis from Kauai, 

 rightly described them as belonging to a distinct species, C. sclateri ; but three years 

 after Mr. Sclater was loth to admit its validity. He, however, in ' The Ibis ' for 1885, 

 rendered the great service of giving, for the first time, two coloured figures of the true 

 C. sandvicensis, though it must be said that these figures were temporarily the cause 

 of confusion, for on one of them Dr. Stejneger in 1887 founded his C. ridgwayi, and 

 on the other his C. ibidis. Moreover, the remarks of the latter were the means of 



