General Notes. 
149 
3. CEdemia perspicillata, Fleming. Surf-Duck. “ One specimen, 
immature, procured May 3, 1876. It was observed in company with 
‘ Black Jacks’ ( Fuligula a finis) ”. 
Mr. Hurtur also writes that he took a tine specimen of the Purple 
Gallinule (Porphyrio martinica) at the same locality, April 18, 1877. 
These birds are now all preserved in Mr. Hurtur’s collection, which em- 
braces nearly all the species common to the vicinity of St. Louis. — J. A. 
Allen, Cambridge , Mass. 
The Carolinian Fauna. — In Mr. E. P. Bicknell’s excellent paper on 
southern birds occurring at Riverdale, N. Y. (see this number of the Bul- 
letin, pp. 128 - 132), I am pleased to find so strong a confirmation of what I 
ventured to write in 1871 (when the accessible data bearing on the subject 
of the northern boundary of the Carolinian Fauna were much fewer than 
now), namely: “On the Atlantic coast this fauna [Carolinian] includes 
Long Island and a small portion of Southeastern New York, which form 
its northern limit.” I also enumerated thirty-two species as being in a 
general way “ limited in their northward range ” by this fauna, adding 
that a few of them occur also “ as stragglers in the Alleghanian Fauna.” * 
These thirty-three species include not only those enumerated by Mr. Biek- 
nell, but also many others equally characteristic of the Carolinian Fauna. 
Boundaries between faunae cannot of course be drawn trenchantly ; 
there must be a slight overlapping of northern and southern species, re- 
sulting in a debatable or transitional narrow belt between two contiguous 
faunae where neither are typically developed. As Mr. H. A. Purdie stated 
in 1873, “no part of New England has been embraced within the Caro- 
linian Fauna, and properly so, but that its southern border has a tinge of 
it is quite evident.”! While no part of Connecticut is perhaps typically 
Carolinian, its southern border, especially about the mouth of the Con- 
necticut River, is so strongly tinged with it that it may be regarded as 
doubtful whether it is not as much Carolinian as Alleghanian. | Several 
of the Carolinian birds, in certain years at least, straggle northward, 
especially in the valley of the Connecticut, to Massachusetts, while some 
are of quite regular appearance, in very small numbers, as far northward 
and eastward as Essex County. Yet they are too few in number and too 
uncertain in their occurrence to form a characteristic element of the 
fauna. 
In the opening paragraph of Mr. Bicknell’s paper he refers to the limi- 
tation of faunae and florae as being “ to a certain extent uncomformable 
* Bull. Mus. Comp. Zool., Yol II, pp. 393, 394, April, 1871. 
t Amer. Nat., Yol. VII, p. 693, November, 1873. 
t This “tinge” in Southern Connecticut, and in fact in the extreme south- 
eastern (maritime) portions of IJew England generally, is especially shown by the 
distribution of reptiles, where several southern species are sparingly represented 
which do not occur at all at more northerly localities. 
