96 PROCEEDINGS OE THE ACADEMY OF 



The adults will be from the countries where each form breeds, 

 and the 3'oung from those to which they wander (generallj^ in the 

 autumn or winter). 



We have in Europe (including Iceland and Spitzbergen as Euro- 

 pean), in m3'- opinion, four^ species of Lagopus ; for I count L. sco- 

 ticus as a species, since it can be always most readily distinguished 

 from L. albus, and has (nowadays) a different habitat, but that 

 it is only L. albus modified to suit an insular climate, I am per- 

 suaded; just as I am that Lepus hihernicus is a mere insulated 

 form of L. timidiis, Linn, nee auctt, (Cf. P. Z. S. 1864, p. 497.) 

 Of L. scoticus, however, I need say nothing here. L. albus, of 

 which remains are found in the caves of the "Reindeer period" in 

 the south of France, together with those of Nyctea nivea, is now- 

 adays, as you no doubt know, confined to Norway and Sweden in 

 Western Europe, Finland and Russia in the East. Its south- 

 ernmost limits in Russia I do not know. I think I have read 

 somewhere of its occurring in the very east of Prussia, but I can- 

 not be sure. Between European and American specimens of L. 

 albus, I have never been able to detect any difference at all. The 

 L.brachydacfylus of Temminck, figured by Werner (Atl. Ois. Eur.) 

 and by Gould, is L. albus, as I know by the type at Lej-den which 

 I have examined (so also says Schlegel somewhere). It is a win- 

 ter bird with perfectly white remiges ; but I may here remark that 

 the variation in the color of the remiges (I speak of the adult, 

 for in the young the primaries first assumed and borne till the 

 first moult are always brown) seems to me but an individual 

 character. Examples killed from the same flock exhibit much 

 diversity in the coloring of the space alongside the shaft of the 

 primaries. Sometimes there is a broad dark-colored patch ex- 

 tending along the greater part of it, and sometimes all is pure 

 white. I have noticed much the same thing in American birds. 

 Next to L. albus, we have L. mutus or alpinus — the species to 

 which the Gallic name Ptarmigan is really applicable. This in- 

 habits Scotland, Norway and Sweden, Finland, Northern Russia, 

 the Alps and Pyrenees, its range being determined by the elevation 

 above the sea-level, which varies inversely as the latitude. The 

 male of this in full breeding plumage has a black breast (as 

 figured in Gould's B.of Grt. Brit.), but the/itZZ breeding plumage 



1 P. S. 6 May, 1871. I should now say "five," see next note. 



[July 4, 



