368 Letters, Extracts from Correspondence, Notices, ^c. 



p.- 55, where I referred to what I supposed to be a Philippine 

 specimen obtained at the dispersal of the former Macao 

 Museum. In the crimson colouring of its entire upper parts 

 this species resembles the Brachypternus ceylonus, and bears 

 a similar relationship to its Indian congeners, the different 

 orange-backed Woodpeckers appertaining to the genera Chry- 

 sucolaptes, Brachypternus, and Chrysonotus (v. Tiff a). In like 

 manner, certain other birds are of a deeper or darker hue in 

 Ceylon, e. g. Corvus splendens and Acridotheres tristis; but 

 the Hypsipetes of Ceylon is more like H. psaroides of 

 the sub-Himalayan region than the darker H. ganeesa, Sykes 

 (v. unicolor, Jerdon), of S. India. We know, however, com- 

 paratively little of the special ornithology of the extreme 

 south of the Indian peninsula, where a nearer approach to 

 certain Cinghalese modifications may yet be proved to occur. 

 In the Tenasserim provinces, I remarked that the common House 

 Maina [Amdotheres tristis) was dark-coloured, as in Ceylon ; 

 and the familiar Crow of all that region, from the valley of the 

 Irawadi to beyond Ava, southward to Mergui, is even darker 

 than the Cinghalese variety of C. splendens, and moreover has a 

 much shriller ordinary caw, which is a more remarkable dis- 

 tinction. Otherwise the Burmese Crow exactly resembles the 

 Indian C. splendens, except that the grey of the plumage must 

 be looked for to be observed at all, and then appears very 

 faintly. At Akyab the regular Indian C. splendens is numerous, 

 and has spread to Kyuk Phoo ; but elsewhere in Arakan there 

 is only the C. culminatus, the range of which extends southward 

 down the Malayan peninsula at least as far as Malacca, and this 

 is probably the supposed C. corax of Raffles's list of the birds of 

 Sumatra. The black and shrill-voiced race of C. splendens docs 

 not appear to inhabit the Malayan peninsula ; at least it is not 

 found in Penang, Malacca, or Singapore, and, like the corre- 

 sponding ordinary Crow of India, it only occurs where there is 

 a dense human population. But in Malacca, or its vicinity, is 

 found the C. maa'orhynchus, Vieillot, a very distinct black Crow, 

 which Mr. Moore has lately described in the Catalogue of the 

 late India-House collection by the name C. tenuirostris, and under 

 the supposition that it had been killed in Bombay ! I have seen 



