and the Transvaal, founded upon the collections made by that excellent
collector, Mr. Thomas Ayres. It is difficult to put too high an estimate
upon the field work which the last-named naturalist has done
during the last five-and-twenty years. On changing his residence
to the Transvaal, he continued his natural history labours in that
State, and has published many interesting essays on its ornithology.
It is indeed to be hoped that either Mr. Gurney or Mr. Ayres
himself will gather together these scattered memoirs, and give them
to us ere long in a connected form. The corrections in nomenclature
have been somewhat numerous, and we fear that some of
them have escaped our eyes, scattered as they are through many
volumes of the Ibis.
Our knowledge of the ornithology of Natal has also been increased
by Captain Shelley in his paper in the Ibis for 1875, and
excellent lists of the birds met with by Mr. T. E. Buckley during
his journey to the Matabele country in 1878, as well as by
Mr. Barratt on his excursions between Bloemfontein and the
Lydenburg Gold-fields have been given in the pages of the Ibis.
A very important work was achieved by the late Mr. Frank Oates
on his journey to the Zambesi, and a full list of his collection
was given by ourselves as an Appendix to his posthumous work,
“ Matabele Land and the Victoria Falls,” edited by his brother,
Mr. C. G. Oates. In the pages of the latter work frequent
mention is made of the name of Dr. F. Bradshaw, a zealous collector,
who resided for some years in the Makulaka country and the
Zambesi region, but whose large collections were unfortunately
dispersed before any connected account had been taken of them.
Some few specimens were secured by the South African Museum ;
others passed into our charge at the British Museum; whilst a large
number are in the collection of Captain Shelley.
Dr. Bradshaw has for some time held an appointment as Surgeon
to the Northern Border Police, and he has favoured us with a list
of the birds observed by him on the Orange River, which we have
had great pleasure in including in our “ Appendix.” In 1882
three very important memoirs on South Africa appeared. One
of these, by Captain Shelley, contains an account of the birds
collected by Mr. Jameson, in his expedition to Mashoona Land,
with excellent field-notes by that veteran naturalist Mr. T. Ayres.
A second paper by Majors Butler, Feilden, and Captain Reid,
published in the Zoologist, gives an account of their ornithological
collections made in the upper districts of Natal; while Dr. Holub
and Herr von Pelzeln published, under the title of “ Beiträge zur
Ornithologie Süd-Afrikas,” a very elaborate work of 385 pages,
profusely illustrated with plates and woodcuts, principally of the
nests and osteology of South African birds.
We must not omit to mention the excellent paper by Sir John
Kirk on the birds of the Zambesi region, published in the Ibis
for 1864; while a vast amount of useful information will be found
in the “ Vögel Ost-Afrikas,” written by Drs. Finsch and Hartlaub,
in 1870. In this work are enumerated all the species collected by
Dr. Peters during his expedition to Eastern Africa, the descriptions
of which are spread over several years of the “ Journal für Ornithologie.”
Besides the elaborate work of Mr. C. J. Andersson on the
birds of Damara Land, the late Mr. Monteiro made important
collections in Benguela and Angola. His work as a pioneer has
been, however, largely supplemented by the vigorous efforts of
Senor Anchieta, a Portuguese naturalist, who has travelled extensively
for the Lisbon Museum in the provinces of Mossamedes and
Benguela, and who penetrated to the Cunene River, a locality
reached by Mr. Andersson shortly before his death. More than
twenty elaborate papers by Professor Barboza du Bocage have
been published on the collections which Senor Anchieta sent to
Europe, and recently a large work on the ornithology of Angola