142 General Notes. February, 
cumstances, that is with a strong wind in the rear. They were 
flying at great height, and during two hours several hundred 
passed over, going towards the south-west, the wind at the time 
being nearly due north and blowing quite hard. They would 
proceed in the ordinary manner for a short time, and then when 
the wind apparently became too strong for them, would wheel 
round and face it, and allow themselves to be carried along by it 
in the same way that a fish sometimes lets himself be carried 
down a rapid current, tail foremost, by simply putting forth just 
strength enough to keep his head up stream. When the wind 
slackened they would again wheel and pursue their way to repeat 
the same manceuvre a little further on. This might seem to bea 
very slow mode of traveling, but after watching a number of 
flocks I concluded that their rate of translation could not be 
much less than that of an ordinary railway train —F. £. L. Bent. 
ZooLocicaL Nores.—The last report for 1878 of Prof, Baird, as 
Fish Commissioner, contains an elaborate descriptive essay on 
the Pycnogonida of New England and adjacent waters, by Mr. 
E. B. Wilson. These spider-like forms, formerly placed with 
the Crustacea, are now generally acknowledged either to form 
should be merged with the genuine Rhizopods; however this 
may be, a new (Monopodium kowalevskyi} has been discov- 
ered at Naples by K. Mereschkowsky. It has no nucleus, the 
point of distinction between Monera and Rhizopoda. As re- 
gards the importance of /oraminifera to the doctrine of descent, 
Professor Moebius, contrary to Carpenter’s opinion that owing to 
their unusual tendency to variation they were not of much value 
to the evolution theory, believes that as confirmatory of Darwin's 
theory of descent, they possess a value neither greater nor less 
than that of all other classes of animals. As the last contribu- 
tion to the question as to the origin of the radial symmetry of the 
Ccelenterates, Prof. John Young has argued from the order 
of development of the septa and tentacles, that the radiate form 
of Ccelenterates arises from the shortening ‘and crowding together 
of the successive septa either side of a line of bilateral symmetry, 
by which an apparent radiation around the mouth is produced. 
——Among recent ornithological publications is Dr. Coues’ Third 
Installment of American Ornithological Bibliography. It forms 
over five hundred pages of the Bulletin of the U.S. Geological 
Survey of the Territories, v, No. 4. This, with the two other 
parts, “represent a nearly complete bibliography of nngitholngy 
so far as America is concerned.” The annual report of Capt. 
