THE BIRDS OF AUSTRALIA. 
In the Proc. Zool. Soc. (Lend.) 1876, p. 671, Saunders lumped the whole 
lot under Anous cceruleus, but in the Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. (Lend.), Vol. 168, 
p. 469, 1879, Sharpe separated P. ccerulea and P. cinereal accepting a bird 
from the Ellice Islands as referable to the former species. 
This nomenclature was followed in the Gat. Birds Brit. Mus., Vol. XXV., 
by Saunders, who admitted the two species with rather strange distribution. 
Receiving birds from the Hawaiian Islands, Fisher {Proc. U.S. Nat. Mus., 
Vol. XXVI., p. 559, 1903) described : — 
Procelsterna saxatilis. Specific characters. Nearest Procelsterna cinerea (Gould) 
but more bluish in colour, with darker upper parts, darker breast, sides, flanks and lower 
tail-coverts and with pearly -gray under wing-coverts (instead of white of cinerea), shorter 
and slenderer bill, and shorter wing. 
Necker Islands, Hawaiian Group. 
Fisher noted (p. 561) : — 
In some respects the present form is intermediate between Procelsterna cerulea (Bennett) 
and P. cinerea (Gould). This is true of the size, in a general way, and also of the colour 
of the imder parts. The under parts of cerulea are fully as dark as the back which (in 
an old skin collected by T. R. Peale, Dog Island, Low Archipelago) is more ashy than 
that of saxatilis. Procelsterna saxatilis shows its closer relationship with cinerea in the 
light lower parts and light gray wedges on the four outer-primaries. As mentioned above, 
however, it is smaller than cinerea, with conspicuously shorter wing and shorter and 
slenderer bill. 
Measurements of P. saxatilis . . Wing 183-186 ; Culmen 25-26.5 
,, P. cinerea . . ,, 211 ,, 28 
„ P. “ plumheus” . . ,, 180 ,, 25.5 
Fisher apparently had no typical birds of P. cerulea with which to make 
comparison, so had to fall back upon the type or topotype of Peale’s 
P. pluniheus ; but Christmas Island is much closer to Necker Island than the 
Paumotus are, while of course there could be little doubt that the Sandwich 
Island bird would be different from the North Australian form. As Christmas 
Island is the type-locality of Bennett’s S. cerulea, it seems possible to attach 
for the present the Sandwich Island birds. In which case the Paumotus birds, 
according to Fisher, would be separable. I have not seen long series of any 
form save the Australian and I find that birds from the Friendly Islands are 
very close and for the present must be associated with them. 
Specimens from the Society Islands and the Marquesas belong to the well 
differentiated cerulea ” form, and should bear Lafresnaye’s name as his 
description agrees well with these while his figure is more like this form than 
the next. I would therefore designate as type-locahty of 8. teretirostris 
Lafresnaye, the Paumotu group. 
Birds from the Ellice group, Phoenix group and Samoa agree in being 
obviously darker than the preceding, and smaller in the wing, and have, 
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