694 
Letters , Extracts, Notices, fyc. 
Sirs, —I am indebted to Mr. James Gardner, the well- 
known taxidermist of 29 Oxford Street, London, for per¬ 
mission to describe an unrecorded egg of the Great Auk, 
which he has recently obtained. 
This egg, which measures x 3", is marked with lines 
of pale grey, and at the larger end has several blotches, which, 
in consequence of having a thinner layer of shell over them, 
show greenish grey. 
Unfortunately, some former owner of the egg has tried to 
clean it by scraping it with a knife, and has thus destroyed 
the surface of the egg, except where the blotches have escaped 
the cleaning process, and there the slight remains indicate 
that the texture was of a rough coarse grain. 
The only history I have been able to obtain is, that for 
over 25 years the egg, packed in a box, had been hidden 
away in a book-case, and there is no information forthcoming 
as to when or where it was obtained by the person who 
placed it there. 
Yours &c., 
Edward Bidwell. 
1 Trig Lane, E.C., 
August 23rd, 1900. 
Sirs, —The last number of f The Ibis' (ante, p. 570) con¬ 
tained an account, taken from the Abstracts of the Proceedings 
of the Geological Society for March 21st (Session 1899-1900, 
p. 77), of the discovery by Prof. H. G. Seeley of a bird’s bone 
from the Stonesfield Slate. The bone was identified as the 
right humerus of a Carinate bird, and as resembling the cor¬ 
responding bone in a Flamingo in size and in some structural 
characters. It was shown that the bone must have belonged 
to a bird that diverged in no way from modern types, and no 
indication was afforded of any affinity to Archaeopteryx . 
The specimen was found by Professor Seeley amongst a 
collection of Pterodactyl bones obtained by the late Earl of 
Enniskillen from Stonesfield; this collection is nowin the 
British Museum. 
At the Meeting of the Geological Society, Dr. C. W. 
Andrews, of the British Museum, pointed out the probability 
