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Show 1869.] DR. G. HARTLAUB ON ANARHYNCHUS FRONTALIS. 433 Mr. Sclater remarked that the much vexed question whether L. erythropterus were really the female of L. perspicillatus might thus be considered to be finally set at rest. Dr. Habel, of N ew York, exhibited and made remarks on a selection from a collection of birds formed in the Galapagos Islands, to which he had recently paid a five months' visit. Dr. Habel stated that his whole collection embraced upwards of 300 specimens, referable to about 70 species, some of which he believed to be new to science. Dr. Habel had likewise made extensive collections in other branches of natural history, and was preparing to publish a complete account of the fauna of the Galapagos based upon these investigations. The following papers were read :- 1. On Anarhynchus. By Dr. G. HARTLAUB, F.M.Z.S. It is now thirty-six years since a good French work, the zoological part of the ' Voyage de l'Astrolabe,' by Quoy et Gaimard (Zoologie, Paris, 1833), brought to our knowledge the full and rather detailed generic and specific description of a very curious grallatorial bird from the east coast of the Northern Island of New Zealand. This bird was introduced into the system under the name of Anarhynchus, its beak being "recourbe en haut comme les Avocettes et devie a droite." Though the hunters of this expedition had killed a certain number of individuals, only one, a younger bird, " dont le sexe n'etait pas encore caracterise," was deposited in the galleries of the Jardin des Plantes. Besides this one specimen, the beaks of several others had been collected and preserved, to show that the most anomalous, nay almost incredible, lateral bend of the apical half of the beak was not an accidental but a constant formation. What has become of these beaks? Whether they have really been deposited in the Paris Museum, and whether they are still to be found there or not, nobody has ever ascertained. The unique and very indifferent-looking specimen in the Paris collection having been overlooked by most ornithologists, the whole Anarhynchus-msdtex became rather apocryphal, and the more so when the Nestor of English ornithologists, Mr. G. R. Gray, declared that this bird was represented in the 'Voyage de l'Astrolabe' with a deformed beak, that organ being perfectly straight in most specimens. Now it is really difficult to understand how such an apodictical opinion could have been given by one who certainly had never seen an Anarhynchus; for so much is certain, that up to this year no other specimen of the rare New-Zealand bird had reached any of the greater collections of Europe. In Dieffenbach's work, as well as in the ' Zoology of H.M.SS. Erebus and Terror,' it is simply enumerated ; and Bonaparte, who most erroneously places Anarhynchus between Terekia |