Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 6 (1902).djvu/373

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read in a recent number of the 'Athenæum':—"Not content with his immense Shakespearian labours, Dr. Horace Howard Furness has caught the largest recorded Tarpon (246 lb.), landing his fish in thirty minutes, and returning it, like a sportsman, to the water as being inedible."

[Tarpon atlanticus is now a well-known fish to those anglers who can follow their craft on another continent. Jordan and Evermann gives its range as "Long Island to Brazil," and its weight as from 30 to 110 pounds ('Fishes of North and Middle America,' p. 409). Evermann and Marsh, however, in their Report on 'The Fishes of Porto Rico,' state that this fish reaches a weight of "30 to more than 300 pounds. The largest one recorded as taken on a hook weighed 209 pounds, and the largest taken with the harpoon weighed 383 pounds, if we may believe the record; but examples weighing over 100 pounds are not often seen."—]

in a lighthouse should be an experience in the life of anyone, but more especially of an ornithologist, versed in and still studying the migration of birds. Mr. W. Eagle Clarke passed the time between the 18th of September and the 19th of October in the Eddystone Lighthouse, and his ornithological observations have recently been published in the 'Ibis.' It is obviously impossible to condense the information given in this paper to the dimensions of our present space, but we notice an interesting and apparently unrecorded fact, that the Herring-Gull feeds exclusively on seaweed, especially on the kind known as "sea-thongs" (Himanthalia lorea). The "mesmeric influence" of the light was found to exercise its greatest force on the Starling, and, after that bird, on the Sky-Lark. The prevalence of rain is evidently a matter of indifference to migratory birds, but the presence of fog has a contrary effect, though this may be largely due to the noise made by the explosions of tonite which takes place every five minutes on the lighthouse during a fog.

An egg of the Moa was recently offered for sale at the well-known London Auction Rooms. The 'Daily Chronicle' has printed an interesting paragraph anent this egg:—

"Messrs. Arthur G. Eve and Co., Australian merchants, write to