of Naumann's 'Vogel Deutschlands.' 51 



can scarcely be distinguished from examples known to be Ice- 

 landers, and these are in adult as well as immature plumage. 

 It may therefore be fairly taken for granted that the Iceland 

 Falcon breeds in at least some part or parts of Greenland, and, 

 according to Mr. Audubon (Orn. Biogr. ii. p. 553), also in 

 Labrador, though the birds figured by him (B. Am. pi. 196)*, 

 as having been shot from their nest, are obviously young, and not 

 old ones as he and his party imagined. Yet it cannot be dis- 

 puted that its head-quarters are in Iceland ; and probably from 

 that country most of the examples killed from time to time in 

 more southern latitudes originated. Though the falconers of 

 the " Royal Dane " no longer make their annual pilgrimage to 

 Bessestad, there to receive, from the persons duly appointed to 

 take them from the nests, the eyasses, on which so high a price 

 was set, yet the various public and private collections throughout 



but the ingenuity of Holboll's notion, erroneous as it seems to us, must be 

 fully allowed. Letting alone its prior use by Gmelin in another sense 

 (Syst. Nat. i. p. 271), the earliest publication of the name Falco arcticus we 

 have been able to find is in ' Naumannia' for 1857 (p. 231), by Prof . Blasius, 

 who mentions it as having been communicated to him orally or in a letter 

 by Holboll, and the interpretation ascribed to it there is substantially the 

 same as we have given above. 



* These are named in the plate " Falco labradora." It is worthy of re- 

 mark, that many of the examples obtained from Labrador are very darkly 

 coloured, but, as far as our own knowledge of them goes, they have always 

 been birds of the year. We have seen in some continental museum — we 

 forget where — a specimen from that country of a deep and almost uniform 

 brown, so as strongly to resemble the rare Australian Falco subniger of Mr. 

 G. R. Gray (Ann. N. H. xi. p. 37 1 ; Gould, B. Austral, i. pi. 9). The so-called 

 Falco sacer of Forster (Phil. Trans. 1772, Ixii. pp. 383 & 423), of which Sir 

 John Richardson copies the description (Fauna Bor.-Amer. ii. p. 30), we 

 are at a loss to refer to any known bird. It is stated to have had its 

 head and whole under surface white with longitudinal brown marks, its 

 upper parts dark brown, and its irides yellow ; this last being a character 

 especially dwelt on by the author, and not existing in any species or race 

 of true Falco, as now restricted, known to us. Mr. Cassin in 1856 (B. 

 Calif, p. 89) and Dr. Brewer (N. Am. Ool. part i. p. 11) apply this specific 

 name to the large Falcons of the New World collectively ; but the 

 former gentleman seems since to have altered his opinion, as in 1858 

 (Rep. Pac. R. R. ix. p. 13) he omits that designation, and speaks of Falco 

 candicans and F. islandicus by these appellations as North American 

 species. 



