52° THE AUSTRALIAN NATURALIST. 
swiftness, that our fleetest greyhounds are left far behind im 
every attempt to catch them. The flesh was eaten and tasted 
like beef. 
_“ Besides the emu, many birds of prodigious size have been 
seen, which promise to increase the number of those described 
by naturalists, whenever we shall be fortunate to obtain 
them” (p. 142). 
From this account we learna fact of fundamental importance: 
not to be gleaned so satisfactorily from any other source—that 
one of the officers or members of the First Fleet, possibly 
Captain Tench himself, brought with him from England, a copy 
of Oliver Goldsmith’s “‘ Animated Nature,’ published in 1774. 
This is the peg on which the whole story hangs. 
In“The Animated Nature” Goldsmith described at some length 
the three species of ostrich-like birds then known to naturalists. 
But it is important to note that he followed the example of 
Buffon in not using the binomial names which Linneus had 
already applied to them, namely, Struthio camelus, S. casuwardus, 
and S. rhea. Accordingly, Goldsmith treats of them, under 
their vernacular names only, as the Ostrich, the Emu, ‘‘which 
many call the American Ostrich,” and the Cassowary. 
Other points to be noted are, that Captain Tench and his. 
colleagues, with the aid of ‘The Animated Nature,” seem to 
have held a sort of scientific inquest upon the new bird; that 
the problem which they endeavoured to solve was, whether it 
was an ostrich, an emu (South American Ostrich), or a casso- 
wary, in the general sense in which those terms were used by 
Goldsmith; and that their verdict was that, though it was not 
the Kmu or South American Ostrich, it was to be regarded as an 
imu.  “ Besides the emu,” Tench says, obviously meaning the 
New Holland or New South Wales Emu, though evidently he 
thought it superflous to mention this. ‘T’ench’s account leaves. 
us to draw our own conclusions upon two important matters, 
namely, exactly how the verdict was arrived at, and whether it 
was in all respects a unanimous one. Satisfactory answers to 
these questions are, to some extent, conjectural; but there is 
no great difficulty in the way of settling the more important 
points, for in arriving at their verdict, Tench and _ his. 
colleagues were influenced by several obvious considerations. 
In the first place, the order in which Goldsmith places the 
birds counted for something. It will be noticed that Tench 
makes no mention of the characters which differentiate the New 
Holland Emu from the Cassowary. Wither in following Gold- 
smith’s order he did not get as far as the Cassowary ; or, what 
perhaps is more likely, the absence of the casque, of wattles, and 
of wing-quills, the equality in length of the claws, and the much 
greater length of the alimentary canal may, not unreasonably, 
have been deemed sufficient to outweigh the presence of the 
aftershaft in both birds, and so to put the Cassowary out of 
