NOVTTATES ZooLoaiCAE XXIV. 1917. 287 



example, that in Marocco some Spanish residents called the Little Bustard 

 " FrancoHn." 



After all this it is, I hope, clear that the Francolin cannot, under any cir- 

 cumstances, be called " Francolinus orlentalis," as Buturlin would have it, and 

 that the Black-bellied or Imperial Sandgrouse is to be named : 



Pterocles orlentalis (L.). 



Now to the correct name of the Francolin. Linne called a bird Tetrao 

 francolinus {Syst. Nat. ed. xii. i. p. 275, 1766). The short diagnosis is : 

 " Tetrao pedibus nudis calcaratis, abdomine gulaque atris, cauda cuncata." 

 Wretchedly short as this description is, it does well for the Francolin and excludes 

 any Sandgrouse ("pedibus nudis calcaratis"), except the description of the 

 tail, which is not cuneate in the F«'ancohn ; this mistake might either have 

 arisen from Linnaeus mixing up his own Tetrao orientalis of 1758 with the franco- 

 linus of 1766, or from the figure of Tournefort, in which the tail looks as if it 

 were pointed. We must now turn to Linnaeus's quotations. These are rather 

 puzzling, for he first quotes his Tetrao orientalis, though not as of 1758 {Syst. 

 Nat. ed. x.), but only " Hasselquist, iter 278, n. 43." As I have shown above, 

 there is no doubt whatever that the latter is purely and entirely the Pterocles, 

 and as the diagnosis (feet bare and with spurs) excludes the latter, the "archi- 

 ater " clearly made a mistake in thinking (very carelessly) that the Tetrao orientalis 

 was the same as the T. francolinus. He further quotes Gesner, Tournefort, 

 OHna, Edwards, and Brisson. Of these only Edwards and Brisson give full 

 descriptions, Edwards a coloured, Brisson a black-and-white plate, Tournefort 

 a recognisable black-and-white figure but no description, Gesner contains irre- 

 levant short notes. OUna figures and describes a bird which appears to be the 

 female of the Francolin, and he calls it " franquellino," but he says that it lives 

 in Barbary, in great numbers in Tunisia, but also in Spain, Sicily — and the Alps ! 

 Thus most of his localities are wrong. As the spurs (which are only found in 

 the male) are only seen in Edwards's plate, Linnaeus must principally have 

 used Edwards. The locality given by Tournefort is Samos, while Edwards 

 (1758) described the bird from Cyprus. Brisson (1760) mentions Italj-, Cyprus, 

 Samos, and Egypt, from where it is said to have been brought to Malta. 



In Italy the bird appears only to have been introduced, though it lived 

 formerly in Sicily ; in Samos it was common, and may exist now ; but it is Cyprus 

 where it occurs even now and used to be common, and from Cyprus speci- 

 mens Edwards fully described and figured it. I therefore accept Cyprus as the 

 terra typica for the Tetrao francolinus L., and this is, in my opinion, the only 

 course one can take, moreover the same form occurs in Asia Minor and Samos. 



VII. THE FORMS OF FRANCOLINUS PONDICERIANVS. 



In the Catalogue of Birds, xxii. pp. 141-143, no subspecies of F. pondi- 

 cerianus were separated, but three forms are distinguishable. 



Tetrao pondicerianus Gmelin, Syst. Nat. i. 2, p. 760 (1789 — «x Sonnerat, 

 Voyage aux Indes, ii. p. 165), was described from Pondicherrj- on the Coromandel 

 coast. The name, therefore, refers to the form inhabiting South India, for 

 example, Tuticorin, Pondicherry, Madras, Mysore, to Ahmednagar and Belgaum, 

 and the northernmost part of Ceylon (Jaffna). This bird is distinguished from 



