IT is easy to make assertions which, however improbable, it is not easy to disprove. I would therefore invite Mr. Albert F. Calvert to furnish documentary evidence of those he has advanced (supra, p. 485). They do not indeed materially affect what I had said; yet, for the sake of accuracy, it might be as well to know on what foundation they rest. Those who are interested in the growth of ideas will be pleased to find that Sir Joseph Banks was so far in advance of his time as, on his return from his voyage with Captain Cook, which ended in 1771, to have “several cases of birds carefully mounted and arranged according to the localities in which they were collected”; and, among them, a “group of land birds from Owhyhee”—an island which Cook did not discover until 1778—or seven years later. As these assertions alone concern the subject on which I wrote, I refrain at present from offering any remarks on the others; but your correspondent seems to have been the victim of a delusion or something worse.