Art. XLVI.—Note on Mr. Howard Saunders' Review of the Larinæ, or Gulls.

By Dr. Buller, C.M.G.

[Read before the Wellington Philosophical Society, 11th January, 1879.]

Mr. Howard Saunders, in his revision of the Larinæ, in the Proc. Zool. Society, Part I., 1878, steps out of his way (at page 161) to notice my having adopted Bonaparte's Bruchigavia, “a genus playfully made,” for a New Zealand species, this being as he states “its only claim to remembrance.” Had Mr. Saunders possessed that close acquaintance with the literature of his subject which is supposed to be an essential qualification in a monographist, he would of course have been aware that Mr. Gould, in his “Handbook to the Birds of Australia” (published in 1865), adopted Bonaparte's playful name for “a genus of gulls the members of which are delicate in their structure, elegant in their appearance, and graceful in all their actions”—deliberately substituting that generic title for Xema, the one previously used in his folio edition.

In 1869, in a communication to ‘The Ibis,’ I described a new species of this group from New Zealand, and provisionally referred it to that genus under the name of Bruchigavia melanorhyncha. To this, no doubt, Mr. Saunders attempted witticism refers, although (at page 190) he incorrectly quotes me for “Bruchigavia melanorhynchus.” But when I treated of the group more exhaustively in my ‘Birds of New Zealand’ (1872), as Mr. Saunders is or surely ought to be aware, I adopted the generic division of Larus for this (= L. bulleri) and the allied forms.

Mr. Saunders is entitled to our thanks, however, for having apparently cleared up the confusion in the nomenclature of this species with Larus pomare. He states that during a recent visit to Bremen he went into the whole question with Dr. Finsch, who had previously studied the subject, and had made numerous and careful drawings of the primaries of Bruch's types of L. pomare in the Mainz Museum, and of many other specimens. He gives figures of the three outer primaries of Larus bulleri, and says, “I have examined the type of Bruch's L. pomare of 1855, and it is undoubtedly of this species; but the type of his L. pomarre of 1853 is as certainly L. novæ-