"ANTHUS GUSTAVI" 127 



submitted to our friend Mr. Dresser, who pronounced it 

 to be a new species, and described and figured it in a 

 work which he was then pubHshing on the birds of 

 Europe, In honour of my having been the first to 

 discover it he named it after me, Anthus seebolnni,* but, 

 alas for the vanity of human wishes, I afterwards 

 discovered that the bird was not new, but had been 

 described some years before from examples obtained 

 on the coast of China, I had subsequently the pleasure 

 of working out its geographical distribution, as the reader 

 who cares to peruse the accompanying footnote may 

 learn. The honour of havino- added a new bird to the 

 European lists still remains to us, and is one of the 

 discoveries made upon our journey on which we pride 

 ourselves. 



In the evening we reached Viski, a small town with a 

 church built upon a flat piece of pasture-land. It was 

 the first villaofe containino^ more than half a dozen houses 



& 



* The Siberian pipit {Anlhus gustavi, Swinhoe) was perhaps the most interesting 

 discovery which we made during our journey. It was first described by Swinhoe 

 in 1863, from specimens obtained at Amoy, in South China, on migration. It is 

 seldom that the history of an obscure bird is so suddenly and completely worked 

 out as has been the case with this species. In 1869, G. R. Gray, of the British 

 Museum, redescribed the species as Anthus batch ianensis, from skins collected by 

 Wallace on the island of Batjan in the Moluccas. In 1871 Swinhoe announced 

 the identity of Gray's birds with the species with which he had previously described 

 from South China. Three years later he identified the species in North China 

 on migration, and also obtained a skin from Lake Baikal. The year after our visit 

 to the Petchora, Drs. Finsch and Brehm found it in the valley of the Ob, a little 

 to the north of the Arctic Circle, and I afterwards found skins in the British 

 Museum from Borneo and Negros in the Philippine Archipelago, and also obtained 

 information that it had been procured in winter at Manila and in Celebes. In 

 1877 I found it breeding in considerable numbers in the valley of the Yenesei 

 in latitude 70^°, and on my journey home I identified skins in the Museum 

 at St. Petersburg, collected by Baron Maydell in Tschuski Land, north of 

 Kamtschatka, and on Bering Island to the east of the peninsula, collected by 

 Wossnessensky. We may therefore conclude that the Siberian pipit breeds on 

 the tundras beyond the limit of forest growth, from the valley of the Petchora 

 eastwards to Bering's Strait, that it passes through South-Eastern Siberia and 

 East China on migration, and winters in the islands of the Malay Archipelago. 



