1 16 The Queensland Naturalist. November, 1922 
“I have often thought/’ he says, “that Rawnsley’s bird 
was the last of a vanished race, as with others of our birds 
since the white man appeared on the scene.” If only for 
the sake of the romance attached to this little problem — 
not to speak of the possibility of finding a survivor of the 
pretty species — 1 can find it in my heart to wish (not to 
say believe) that Mr. Illfdge is right. 
It was not many years afterwards that another pretty 
little problem of the kind arose, and in this instance Gould 
himself “fell in,” just as Higgles had done with 
“Rawnsley’s Bower bird” of the Indooroopilly scrub. It 
was this way : In the year 1874 an employee of Joshua Peter 
(later Sir Joshua) Bell, of the old-established Jimbour 
Station, Darling Downs, shot a very beautiful bird, which 
combined the brilliance and other characters of the King 
Parrot and the regal Red- winged Parrot. Emerald green, 
scarlet, golden-yellow, deep blue, greenish blue, and 
purplish black, all were combined in tiiis lovely and novel 
creature, whose beauty moved Gould to enthusiasm. “I 
wish,” he wrote, in the Birds of Sew Guinea , 1875 (which 
included “any species that may be discovered in 
Australia”), “I wish it were in my power to write a 
complete history of the splendid Parrot figured in the 
accompanying plate. All that is at present known is that 
it was shot, in 1874, a few miles north of the village of 
Dalby, on the Darling Downs, in Queensland. My first 
knowledge of its existence was through a life-sized sketch 
at the hands of the son of Mr. Waller. Since then the 
actual specimen has been forwarded to me by Mr. Coxen, 
who has purchased it for the infant museum of Brisbane/’ 
Prom this he goes on to admit the resemblance of the 
specimen to the King and Red- winged Parrots, but points 
out that lie found the former to be an inhabitant of “brush” 
(scrub- jungle) while the Red-wing frequented the thinly- 
timbered open plains. This fact, combined with the 
differences in flight of the two birds, convinced Gould that 
the beautiful specimen under notice was not a lusus, or 
hybrid, and so he referred it to the King Parrot genus, 
under the name of Aprosmictus insignissimus, at the same 
time returning thanks to the Brisbane Museum for its 
“extreme courtesy” in sending the specimen to England. 
Alas, this was a case wherein our ornithological Homer 
nodded! Gould did not know, as we do now, that the 
King and Red-winged Parrots occasionally meet. Nor did 
he know, as we do, that they (as well as one or two other 
species of Parrots) interbreed on rare occasions. His 
“new” bird, then, was just a hybrid, but a very beautiful 
