Fauna and Flora of New Guinea and the Pacific Islands

Abstract

I HAVE just read, with very great interest, some anthropological and zoological notes on a trip up the “Fly River” in New Guinea, by Signer D'Albertis. From these notes it appears that the “heaps of dung” which have been supposed to indicate the presence of a rhinoceros in the island, are probably the excrement of the Casuarius. Signor D'Albertis also reduces the “tracks of buffaloes” to those of wild hogs; and the fabulous bird “with a spread of wings of 16 feet” (which, in a former letter, I conjectured might have been a Casuarius, with proportionately large wings added by the imagination of the explorers under the influence of excitement), turns out to be nothing more than a Buceros ruficollis with a spread of wings of “4 or 5 feet.”