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Show 162 PROF. NEWTON ON NEW BIRDS' EGGS. [Jan. 24, intending, as I had done on a former occasion, to contribute a paper respecting them to our ' Proceedings.' To my dismay, however, when about to give instructions to the artist who was to draw the plate illustrating the paper, it was found that one of the most interesting novelties (the egg of Didunculus strigirostris) was missing from the care of our excellent Secretary. Thus deprived of my chief ornament, I thought it better to defer the printing of the paper; and this I did the more willingly, because Mr. Sclater assured me that the absent specimen was only mislaid, and would certainly be found again in the course of time. The result has proved as he predicted; the lost sheep turned up a few weeks ago; and accordingly I now reproduce the remarks I made nearly two years ago, adding observations on some other specimens which have in the meantime come into m y possession. When in 1861 I first brought some oological specimens before the Society (P. Z. S. 1861, p. 393) I must confess to having taken rather too sanguine a view of the utility of oology as a help to classification. Further experience and the examination of very large series of specimens have almost induced in me a belief which perhaps might be best expressed by parodying the celebrated saying of a celebrated man, and would almost make me define oology as "a science in which size and colour go for nothing at all, and shape and grain for very little." However, notwithstanding Voltaire's epigram, no one doubts there is a science of etymology; and since his time philologists have begun to get a right notion of the value of vowels and consonants. I therefore hope oology may yet keep its rank, and that in time we may come to comprehend the very variable characters which birds' eggs present in their size, colour, shape, and grain. SWALLOW-TAILED KITE. Elanoidesfurcatus (Linnaeus). So much interest has long been attached to the breeding of this bird that, though I had no specimen of its egg to exhibit, 1 thought myself justified in 1865 in reading some notes with which m y friend Mr. H. E. Dresser had furnished me. These, however, have since appeared in print (Ibis, 1865, p. 325-327), and I need say no more on the subject, except to remark that the four eggs which are stated to have been obtained for him have not yet reached England. NUTCRACKER. Nucifraga caryocatactes (Linnaeus). (Pl. X V . fig. 2.) Thanks to m y friends H H . Pastor Theobald and J. C. II. Fischer of Copenhagen, I have at length the pleasure of exhibiting to the Society the nest and four eggs of the Nutcracker, taken in the same locality as the nest and fully-fledged young bird which I exhibited in June 1862 (P. Z. S. 1862, p. 206), and by the same persons. In 1863 m y friends were again disappointed of getting the ego-s of this bird, which proved to be a still earlier builder than theyhad |