THE 
AMERICAN NATURALIST 
Vor. XXIX: May, 1895. ; 341 
THE BIRDS OF NEW GUINEA. 
By G: S. MEAD. 
(Continued from page 9). 
No one is more deserving of the honor of having a bird of 
paradise named after him than Mr. Wallace. Such an honor, 
it is true, is not an extraordinary one in his case, being 
scarcely more than the customary recognition of a first dis- 
covery, but at all events it serves to remind us how closely he 
has identified himself with a beautiful family of birds, while 
his still greater labors for knowledge have already secured the 
reward of preëminence in the field of science where excel- 
lence is not always remembered by the world at large. 
In “The Malay Archipelago,” the author has told of his 
accidental discovery in the island of Batchian of a new spe- 
cies which was called from his name Semioptera wallacei. 
This was as along ago as 1858, and in all the intervening years 
no one has succeeded in making the bird a familiar inmate of 
museums. It is not of remarkable beauty, although its ap- 
pearance is, in one respect at least, strangely peculiar, viz., in 
that which gives it the name Standard-wing. This curious 
formation is not a wing at all, but two flexible feathers spring- 
ing from either shoulder, six inches in length and quite dis- 
tinct from every other part of the plumage. As they stand 
out, swaying slightly to every movement, they look not unlike 
28 
