GENERAL NOTES. _ 571 
numerous examples among our garden or introduced wild 
plants, and may study them text-book in hand. 
To the New Zealand botanist the most noteworthy feature 
of this work will be, that while full of suggestion, instruction, 
and interest to him, it still leaves the field almost untouched 
as far as he is concerned. He will find in its pages a fund of 
valuable information, but the main problems regarding the 
fertilisation of flowers here are still to be worked out. Not only 
are the individual features of the several species still but im- 
perfectly known; there are the wider questions of the prevalence 
of white flowers, the brilliancy of our Alpine flora, the re- 
markable tendency towards separation of the sexual organs, 
and others of a similar nature, still requiring investigation. And 
side by side with this, we require a more complete knowledge of 
our insect life. This branch of biology has only recently been 
attacked with any degree of energy, but thanks to the labours of 
various systematists in our midst, a considerable amount of 
work is now being done. We shall soon have tolerably com- 
plete lists of our Lepidoptera, Coleoptera, and Hymenoptera ; 
but as yet hardly anything is known of the Diptera, which are 
great insect-fertilisers, and in my opinion (judging necessarily 
from very imperfect data) are relatively of much more im- 
portance here than in Europe. 
An excellent feature in Mr Thompson’s translation is the 
compendious bibliographical list at the end of the work, a list 
containing over 800 references, and including nearly all the 
books and papers which have been written on the subject since 
Sprengel’s time. The excellent woodcuts which illustrate the 
work are reproduced from the original German edition. 
GENERAL NOTES. 
a 
A NEw SPECIES OF NOTORNIS.—Most of our readers will 
recollect that a Motornis—the third known specimen—was ob- 
tained about four years ago near lake Te Anau, and though 
every effort was made at the time to acquire the skin and skele- 
ton for one of the colonial museums, its owner sent the specimen 
to Europe for sale. It was purchased for the Dresden Museum, 
and we learn from “ Nature,” of the 16th August, that Dr. Meyer 
proved in his “ Abbildungen von Vogelskelettes” that it belonged 
to a different species from that originally described by Prof. 
Owen from a skull and bones found in the North Island. It 
would thus appear that JV. mantel, the North Island species, has 
become extinct, while VV. Zochstetteri, the South Island form, has 
still a few living representatives. We have no copy of Dr. 
Meyer’s paper, and therefore do not know on what characters 
he founds these species, but they are evidently sufficient to show 
