98 Letters, Announcements, fyc. 
on a skeleton of which Notornis mantelli of Owen was origi¬ 
nally found ed, must be of a different species. The three 
specimens of Notornis in the British Museum he considers 
to he likewise referable to N. hochstetteri. Dr. J. v. Mada- 
rasz describes and figures a new Tetraophasis ( T . szechenyii ), 
obtained by the expedition of Graf Bela Szechenyi in Sze¬ 
chuan. The chief article in part 3, for 1885, is an impor¬ 
tant memoir on the birds collected by Dr. Platen in 1878 in 
Southern Celebes, from the pen of Dr. W. Blasius. This 
contains a mass of important observations on 55 species, and 
gives figures of Alophonerpes wallacii, Cyrtostomus frenatus, 
var. nov. plateni, Streptocitta albicollis, S. torquata , and 
Ptilopus temmincki . 
XIII.— Letters, Announcements, fyc. 
We have received the following letters addressed to the 
Editors of f The Ibis — 
Sirs, — f The Ibis^ for January last (pp. 118,119) contains 
some account of a remarkable discovery by Mr. E. M. Brig¬ 
ham as regards the development of the Hoatzin ( Opistho - 
comus cristatus ), which is said to possess, when first hatched, 
two pairs of legs, the anterior pair becoming subsequently 
metamorphosed into wings by suppression of the digits and 
exfoliation of the claws. 
It may be of interest to point out that there is some reason 
for believing that the young of the Hoatzin was procured in 
Brazil, and figured more than two centuries ago by George 
Marcgrav, who, in the capacity of physician, along with Dr. 
William Piso, accompanied Prince Moritz of Nassau to Brazil 
between the years 1637-44. Marcgrav, as is well known, made 
a special study of the fauna of that country, and collected a 
number of observations, which were published after his death 
by his friend Piso, in a joint work entitled f Historia Natu- 
ralis Brasilia/ printed in folio at Leiden in 1648. The fifth 
book of Marcgrav^s portion of this work, treating of the birds 
of Brazil, contains (at p. 219) a figure of a four-footed chick, 
accompanied by the following remarks :— 
