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by the proprietors for £125. Some interesting details concerning the history of gigantic birds' eggs have been supplied by a contemporary, and we quote them for our readers: In 1854, M. Geoffroy de St. Hilaire exhibited to the French Academy some eggs of the Epyornis, a bird which formerly lived in Madagascar. The larger of these was 12.1 inches long, and 11.8 inches wide; the smaller one was slightly less than this. The Museum d'Histoire Naturelle at Paris also contains two eggs, both of which are larger than the one recently put up for sale, the longer axis of which measures 10 inches, and the shorter 7 inches. In the discussion which followed the reading of M. de St. Hilaire's paper, M. Valenciennes stated it was quite impossible to judge of the size of a bird by the size of its egg, and gave several instances in point. Mr. Strickland, in some
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Notices of the Dodo and its Kindred, published in the
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Annals of Natural History for November, 1849, says that in the previous year a Mr. Dumarele, a highly respectable French merchant at Bourbon, saw at Port Leven, Madagascar, an enormous egg, which held
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The natives stated that the egg was found in the jungle, and
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Mr. Strickland appears to doubt this, but there seems no reason to do so. Allowing a pint and a half to each of the so-called
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the egg would hold 19-1/2 pints. Now, the larger egg exhibited by St. Hilaire held 17-1/2 pints, as he himself proved. The difference is not so very great. A word or two about the nests of such gigantic birds. Captain Cook found, on an island near the north-east coast of New Holland, a nest
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(Kerr's
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Collection of Voyages and Travels, xiii. 318.) Captain Flinders found two similar nests on the south coasts of New Holland, in King George's Bay. In his
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Voyage, etc., London, 1818, he says:
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They were built upon the ground, from which they rose above two feet, and were of vast circumference and great interior capacity; the branches of trees and other matter of which each nest was composed being enough to fill a cart.
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Die Isepiptesen Russlands;