AUSTRALIAN BROW-WINGED TERN. 
from which secure hiding-places, queer crooning noises, of devoted pairs, 
issued. When daylight arrived all the Brown-wings were silent, and many 
had departed for sea.” 
Dr. Macgillivray * found this bird nesting on many islets the whole length 
of the Great Barrier Reef. On Bushy Island in October, he found it nesting 
under shelving rocks, sometimes as much as two feet under, a little above 
high water mark. On p. 219 {loc. cit.) “ Sterna ancestheta, when hovering 
over the boat, rather puzzled me, as the under surface was a most beautiful 
pale green ; however, it was only the colour of the sea reflected on the pure 
white of the under surface . . . Great numbers of Brownwinged Terns rise 
round us and keep up their shrill cries of distress as they hover overhead. 
We soon find that they have just started to nest. The nest consists simply 
of a depression in the sand, scraped out under a tussock of grass and well 
concealed by it — ^in fact it is only by searching that any can be found at all, 
or by seeing the bird flying from the nest.” 
The bird figured and described is a female, and was collected in Admiralty 
Gulf, North-west Australia, on January 2nd, 1898. 
Before commencing the discrimination of the subspecies of this Tern, 
it seems of interest to settle the spelling of the specific name. In the Nov. 
Zooh, Vol. XVIII., p. 455, 1912, commenting upon the danger of admitting 
the correction of supposed errors of transliteration, I quoted the various 
spellings of the genus name Ghroicocephalus, and concluded that it would be 
best to consider every name to be a word formed by an arbitrary com- 
bination of letters.” I had also noted that the specific name of this Tern 
had suffered abuse through the ‘‘ well-meant ” efforts of misguided purists. 
When Scopoli described the bird he called it Sterna anoethetus. Instead 
of accepting the name as thus written, authors have endeavoured to amend 
it so that it should have a meaning to their liking. Consequently it has been 
written AncEstheta, anostJimta^ anasthoetus, ancesthetica, cenothetus, and pro- 
bably some other ways. Recently the Americans, failing to satisfy them- 
selves what Scopoli could have meant, went back to the original spelling, but 
imagining ancethetus to be an adjective called the bird Sterna anmtheta 
{A.O.U. Checklisty 3rd ed., p. 46, 1910). 
Saunders, in the Cat. Birds Brit. Mus., Vol. XXV., p. 101, 1896, l^ad 
written Steriia ancestheta with the comment, “ Originally ‘ Sterna ancBtheius,' 
many of the older writers maintaining that Sterna was masculine ; subse- 
quently anostheta, ancestheta, &c.” Perhaps, through the influence of this, I 
note in the recent Hand-List of British Birds by Hartert, Jourdain, Ticehurst, 
and Witherby, on p. 196, that Sterna ancestheta is used, the explanation 
*Emu, Vol. X., pp. 21, 233, 1910. 
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