188 NOTES—ORIGINAL AND SELECTED.
the horns are still in the velvet. It appears the young horns are exported to
China, where they fetch very high prices, being employed to make a kind of
soup much esteemed as a fortifier in cases of premature decrepitude and the
like. The results of the Commission's investigations are not yet known, but
it is to be. hoped, our Correspondent says, that a stop will be put to such a
ruinously wasteful and unsportsmanlike traffic before these magnificent
animals are quite exterminated." [It has long been a tradition with foresters
that deer themselves eat the cast antlers, which are so rarely found, a belief
which is now shared by many naturalists, bearing in mind the prodigious
amount of calcareous matter which must be needed to supply bone material
for the annual renovation of the antlers, we can understand the benefit
that the animals may derive from their diet of bone.—Ed.]
AVES.
Capture of an Albatross at Linton on the Essex Border.—The
Rev. J. G. Tuck, of Tostock Rectory, East Suffolk, writes in the Zoologist
(1. 4th ser. 365), that on or about July 1st, 1897, a bird of the Albatross family
was sent to Mr. Travis, of Bury St. Edmunds, for preservation. It had been
caught at Linton, Cambridgeshire, on the borders of Essex. The bird in
colour much resembles a Great Black-backed Gull, and measured in the flesh
perhaps 34 or 36 inches, with an expanse of wing of probably seven feet. Mr.
Tuck adds, "so far as I am aware, only one Albatross of any species has ever
reached England alive, and this lived for a short time in the Zoological
Gardens some twelve or fourteen years ago ; but the beautifully clean plumage
of the Cambridgeshire bird quite precludes the possibility of its ever having
been in confinement." The specimen has since been submitted to Mr. Howard
Saunders and Mr. O. Salvin, and pronounced by these experts to be Diomedea
melanophris, the species "which haunted the Faeroes for 30 years, and which
has also been taken high in the N. Atlantic."
Bird Slaughter. In the Times, October 20, 1897, a correspondent
"Edward Clifford," asks if it is possible to avert the speedy extinction of
small birds in Italy ; thousands of siskins and chaffinches, and hundreds of
robins, linnets, tomtits, thrushes, goldfinches and larks being at this time of
the year sold for the table in Italy, which during the warmer months have
been living in England and other northern countries. On another page of
the same paper, Mr. C. J. Cornish, the well-known naturalist, mentions the
fact that a pelican, supposed to be the one lately in Kew Gardens, which has
recently been seen on the Thames at Corney Reach and on the reservoirs of
the Middlesex Waterworks, has been shot by some British barbarians.
T. V. Holmes.
PISCES.
Ocynus thynnus (Short-finned Tunny) at Foulness.—Mr. H. L.
Matthams recorded in the County Chronicle that a big fish came ashore at
Foulness about the 26th of October. "It was 9ft. long, and as big round as a
horse. It weighed five or six cwt. It was covered with fins and very hard
scales. The flesh was red and very firm." Dr. Laver (to whom we sent the
cutting) is of opinion that this big fish was a short-finned tunny (Ocynus
thynnus) a very rare visitor to our shores. In reply to questions from Dr.
Laver, Mr. Matthams says that the pectoral fin was about a foot in length,
"The fish was so big that a fair-sized man sitting on it could not touch the