Recent Literature. 
53 
British Museum, to Mr. John Gould, and to the late Mr. G. R. Gray. The 
latter dedicated to him the Colymbus adamsi. Unfortunately this youth- 
ful explorer and already accomplished ornithologist died in 1856 at Sierra 
Leone, at the early age of thirty-two. His papers have recently been placed 
by his family in the hands of Mr. H. Stevenson, and have been published 
in the Ibis ” for October of this year.* Much that he observed has been 
anticipated by the notes of Messrs. Dali and Bannister. Yet there are 
several Of his observations at once new and interesting. The most 
noticeable of these is his procuring on the 5th of June, near the redoubt, 
a specimen of the Blue-throated Warbler ( Cyanecula suecica Linn.). 
There were seven in the flock. This is the only instance of the procuring 
of this well-known Paleearctic species in North America. 
So too Motacilla fiava , the Yellow Wagtail, another well-known Palae- 
arctic bird, was found by him quite common at Michalaski. He first met 
with them on the 5th of June, and found their nests on the 12th. Mr. 
Bannister has since found these birds breeding in the neighboring island 
of St. Michael’s. 
The Short-eared Owls came there in the middle of May, and were quite 
common. Mr. Adams’s notes on the Snow Goose, Gambel’s Goose, the 
White-fronted Goose, Painted Goose ( Chlcephciga canayica ), the Black 
Brant, Hutchins’s Goose, the American Scoter, the Blue-eyed Duck ( Lam - 
pronetta jischeri), the Black-throated Eider, Pacific Eider ( S . v-nigrum ), 
etc., are full of new and valuable information. So too are his observa- 
tions concerning the American Dunlin, the Least Sandpiper, the Hudson- 
ian Godwit, Sabine’s Gull, and the Colymbus adamsi , believed by many 
to be a valid species and not a mere form of the Northern Diver. 
These early observations of Alaskan species, which, had they appeared 
at the time they were made, would have anticipated so much of what has 
only recently appeared, have both a melancholy and their own intrinsic 
interest, and are well worthy of attention. — T. M. B. 
Wilson and Bonaparte’s American Ornithology. — A new 
and handsome octavo reprint of Wilson and Bonaparte’s “ Ornithology *’ 
has been issued by Porter and Coates of Philadelphia.! It claims to be 
an exact reproduction, minus the atlas of colored plates, of the $100, 
three-volume edition issued by the same firm some years ago. At the 
beginning of the present book are bound in a large number of illustrations 
of birds, reduced from the original plates of Wilson and Bonaparte. They 
are not bad cuts, for the most part, but are of very little importance or 
* Ibis, 4tli Ser. Vol. II, pp. 420- 442, October, 1878. 
+ American Ornithology ; or, The Natural History of the Birds of the United 
States. Illustrated with plates engraved from drawings from Nature. By 
Alexander Wilson and Charles Lucian Bonaparte. Popular edition. Philadel- 
phia : Porter and Coates. Three volumes in one. 
