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Show 420 DR. J. MURIE ON THE SACS [June 16, Secretary by Mr. William Summerhayes, dated Aroa, Venezuela, February 19, 1874:-- " I have read carfully your Monograph'on the Cracidae : there is no doubt of the correctness of your identification of both Crax dau-bentoni and Pauxi galeata. "I have shot specimens of both kinds in this neighbourhood, and compared them diligently with your Latin descriptions, on the accuracy of which I beg to compliment you. The Crax daubentoni is found here all along the littoral as far as the foot of the mountains (here some 50 or 60 miles inland) ; but as soon as you get among the mountains (and these mines, whence I write, are only some 5 miles up the Sierra and away from the forest which clothes the littoral flat country) you see no more of the C. daubentoni, but numerous specimens of Pauxi galeata." The following papers were read :- 1. On the Nature of the Sacs vomited by the Hornbills. By Dr. JAMES M U R I E , F.L.S. [Eeceived May 9, 1874.] Lapse of time has not erased from my memory the puzzled countenance, not to say blank dismay, of m y friend Mr. A. D. Bartlett, on m y announcing to him m y conclusions respecting the nature of a fig-like envelope containing discoloured grapes, wdiich he suspected had been thrown up by the Wrinkled Hornbill, Buceros corruga-tus. His alarm for the safety of the bird was converted into mirth at m y expense, as a few days afterwards, he returned with a second specimen ejected from the same bird. The latter, it would seem then, was none the worse for losing the interior lining of his stomach, and in the interval had made a new one and got rid of it also. I certainly, at the time, was not prepared for the full extent of the phenomenon. But I felt satisfied from m y examination that the sac was not what is ordinarily regarded as a secretion (namely, glandular product), but rather was of an epithelial horny kind-the veritable gizzard-lining itself, howsoever reproduced. In Mr. Bartlett's cleverly reasoned paper, P. Z. S. 1869, p. 143, an abstract of m y report to him is given. He opposed the notion of the rejected sac being a true gastric lining, and held to its being a secretion provided for and emitted during the breeding-season. H e regarded it as of a nature similar in kind to the proventricular secretion of incubating Pigeons, Parrots, &c. As to its greater solidity and gizzard-membrane characters, these he deemed producible by that viscus, and to be analogous to the gastric mouldings of the indigestible pellets cast up by the Raptorial and Insessorial birds. At the discussion on the paper m y statement of the sac being the epithelial coating of the gizzard was received incredulously. The sac and its contents, and subsequently the viscera of the bird itself, which died shortly after, were consigned to the College-of-Sur- |