dentally described and named this bird, without anywhere giving a formal diagnosis, so that it has escaped general notice. But to return to our ride. We skirted along the eastern side of the Caldera till at the southern end we climbed its rough broken walls for an hour, and descended by a gentle slope upon the southern plain of the island. The course of lava-streams could be easily traced in many directions. We put up at the clean little town of Los Llanos, where is a cigar-factory and some silk-weaving, and which was a convenient centre from which to work the inside of the Caldera. Our first day's expedition, and that from dawn till after sunset, was to the basin of the Caldera, which we entered over the ridge we had climbed yesterday, but several miles lower down, and then turned sharp to the north. The bottom of the crater has a diameter of less than five miles and contains several farms, the wine of which is in repute. But our object was the forest, sadly wrecked and destroyed by wasteful and reckless cutting. Were it not that the Canary pine, unlike any other species with which I am acquainted, sends up shoots from the stump or root of every felled tree, which become small timber in the course of a few years, I fear the pine would soon become extinct in Palma. A mountainbrook ran down the centre of the Caldera, but did not appear to attract any bird save the Grey Wagtail. We had hoped to find the new Tit in some numbers; but though scattered all over the inner sides of the Caldera, where there were pines, the number of individuals was few, and the labour of climbing these precipitous slopes with a gun was most exhausting. Though geologically the most interesting, this was our poorest ornithological day in Palma. There was evidently no harvest to be reaped in the south, so we determined to move quarters to the N.W. end of the island, where we heard of fine forests of pine facing the sea. This was a 14 hours' ride. We had to cross the ridge, still 1500 feet high, which forms the southern wall of the channel through which the lava poured, and then, crossing the bed, a width of two miles, to mount again to the crest of the northern wall, 3000 feet high. The soil all the way to the south point is rich and well cultivated, vines, fruit-trees of all kinds, tobacco, onion, and maize being the principal crops. there were not the birds we wanted. Plenty of Ravens, Choughs, Rock Doves, Pipits, Canaries, Linnets, Buntings, and Goldfinches,-only the birds that accompany cultivation. And after we had reached the western crest, and rode for hours northwards along the heights, though we had a highly developed agricultural country stretching from the heights to the shore, its very richness became monotonous and uninteresting. At length, towards evening, as we were nearing the N.W. corner of the island, we saw in front of us the beginning of a real pine-forest, not straggling trees like those of the Caldera. Our destination was a straggling village of isolated farmsteads, each in the centre of its own vineyard. We were received by the village shopkeeper, who did his best for us and put us up tressel-beds behind the counter. The pine-forests extend for many miles on the higher part of the outer side of the Caldera, right round from the N.W. to the N.E. of the island; and here is the true home of the Palma Titmouse, though Mr. MeadeWaldo did twice find it beyond the limits of the pine. The only other birds which seemed plentiful in the pineforest were the Chiffchaff and the Goldcrest and, near its outskirts, the Blackbird. Our day's ride along the top of the Cumbre, skirting the pine-forest, in fact, on the rim of the old crater, was magnificent, though long, and I know nothing so grand in Tenerife as the view across the Caldera from one of the highest points of its rim, the Pico de Muchachio, 7600 feet above the sea. The rim looked very even all round, as though we were standing on the edge of a titanic boat. At first it was quite clear, and we looked down 5200 feet on to the farms and fields we had visited two days before. It required a young and cool head to look down that precipice from the saddle on a path not more than a yard wide. I preferred to dismount and lie down to peep. I am not aware that in any other part of the world have I ever looked down a cliff sheer for more than 5000 feet. But this is said to be the deepest crater in the world. It is only at this point that the wall of rock is absolutely perpendicular. In a few minutes a volume of cloud came rolling up the southern gap in the crater, and filled it to within 1000 feet of the rim with what seemed a solid mass. Very wonderful it was to see the sharp rim on which we sat standing out in a perfect circle, with only a piece broken out to the south. We were able to tell exactly the height of the clouds, for we knew exactly the measurement of our position and that of the pass from the Ciudad opposite, which was just reached by the clouds. The top of Gomera peered up like a little island, and the Peak of Tenerife beyond, but not a trace of the Cañadas of Tenerife; all below 6000 feet was buried. There was not the slightest haze. There was not a ripple on that pavement of cloud. The crown of Gomera looked so close that at first we thought it must be a piece of the edge of our own crater, and Tenerife looked not twenty miles off. Of course the sea was equally covered with the drapery, and we had an unbroken panorama on all sides. Above us the Choughs soared in flocks till almost lost to sight in the empyrean, the Swifts dashed about us, but other life there was none. We were on the Cumbre, or barren heights, and could see how exactly the cloud-line is limited to the forest-zone or, perhaps, rather fixes its limits, while all above it is dreary, barren desolation. Nor does this daily-recurring cloud result in rain. On this, as on other occasions, we passed through the cloud to the coast, where rain had not fallen for weeks. It was in the northern laurelforests, after we left the pines, that we had our most interesting rambles and scrambles after Pigeons, both White-tail and Bar-tail, which with their results have been so fully described by Mr. Meade-Waldo in the last number of 'The Ibis.' VIII.-Remarks on the Fifth Cubital Remex of the Wing in the Carinatæ. By P. L. SCLATER, Ph.D., F.R.S., &c. ONE of the most remarkable discoveries in the ptilosis of birds that has been made of late years is that the fifth cubital remex (or fifth secondary) is entirely absent in many groups. This curious fact appears to have been first pointed out by M. Z. Gerbe in 1877, in a communication made to the Zoological Society of France*. M. Gerbe writes as follows: "Chez les Rapaces, les Pigeons, les Echassiers et les Palmipèdes, il y a atrophie complète de l'une des rémiges secondaires, et cette atrophie, qui paraît être originelle, porte invariablement sur la cinquième. Ses satellites, c'est-à-dire sa couverture supérieure et sa couverture inférieure, prennent un développement normal, et occupent leur place, respective, comme si elles accompagnaient la penne qui fait défaut. "Ni les vrais Passereaux, ni les Zygodactyles (les Perroquets exceptés) ne présentent cette singulière anomalie." After a lapse of ten years, during which period no one seems to have alluded to the subject, Wray, in the course of his studies of the bird's wing, undertaken during the preparation of specimens for the Index-series in the British Museum of Natural History, rediscovered this phenomenon, and described it, in his valuable paper on the Morphology of the Wings of Birds, as follows: "The chief, most interesting, and most puzzling modification of the cubital feathers is that in a great many birds the fifth remex is always undeveloped, its coverts being normally developed and present. This occurs probably in all birds except Phoenicopterus ‡, Gallinæ, Passeres, and a few Picariæ. Up to the present I have never met with a trace of this • Bull. Soc. Zool. de France, ii. p. 289 (1877). "On some Points in the Morphology of the Wings of Birds," by Richard S. Wray, Proc. Zool. Soc. 1887, p. 343. I am much indebted to the Publication Committee of the Zoological Society of London for their permission to reproduce Wray's excellent illustrations of this subject. [This inclusion of Phoenicopterus among the quincubital birds is an As will be shown below, Phanicopterus is aquincubital.-P. L. S.] a feather in a vestigial condition. If the figures of the preparation of the distal part of the cubitus of the Golden Eagle (see figs. b, b') be compared with those of the Pheasant (see R 1 2 3 R D.C a, a'. Drawings of preparations of the distal cubital remiges, with their attached tectrices majores, of the Pheasant (Phasianus colchicus). a, Dorsal view; a', ventral view. (This shows the "quincubital" condition.) b, b'. Drawings of preparations of the distal cubital remiges, with their 1, 2, 3, &c. the remiges (R), numbered from the wrist-joint; D. C, dorsal figs. a, a'), the exact nature of this modification is at once |