498 Recently published Ornitfioloyical Works. 



lidon fissipes (Linn.) ? It is true, Dr. Coues says lie hopes he 

 will not be accused of arbitrary innovation ; but this disclaimer 

 ■we take to be the " rhetoric of an uneasy conscience." 



The system recently come into vogue amongst American 

 writers on ornithology, of introducing names for " varieties " 

 in addition to generic and specific names, is further carried 

 out by Dr. Coues in this volume. But it would seem that 

 the term ^Wariety'' is receiving a wider application, judging 

 from the treatment of the northern and southern Stilts {Hi- 

 mantojms) of America (p. 462)*; so that a new term will 

 shortly be required to express still finer gradations of obser- 

 vable differences. One thing seems certain respecting this 

 system, viz. that it tends to " polynominalism ^ — a doctrine 

 openly preached by Dr. Coues, but not as yet practised, but 

 yet a doctrine, so far as trinominalism is concerned, to which 

 he has actually converted Mr. Ridgway, who, in a recent 

 paper, puts the system in practice. 



The Birds of Prey have during the last two years come in 

 for an unusual amount of attention. In 1874 both Baird, 

 Brewer, and Ridgway^s volumes on North- American birds, in 

 which these birds were, so far as North America is concerned, 

 fully treated, and Mr. Sharpens ' Catalogue of Birds,' vol. i., 

 containing Accipitres, saw the light. But the energy ex- 

 pended in these volumes does not seem by any means to be 

 exhausted ; for Mr. Ridgway has recently sent us ' Outlines ' 

 of what professes to be a natural arrangement of the Fal- 

 conidse, extracted from the * Bulletin of the United-States 

 Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories,' June 

 10, 1875. 



The arrangement adopted by Mr. Ridgway is nearly that 

 of Professor Huxley (P. Z. S. 1867, p. 415) ; and the charac- 



* H. hrasiliensis is put (with a query, it is true) as a '' variety " of //. 

 nigricollis ;. but not a word do we read of intermediate examples. Con- 

 cerning the former, Dr. Coues says that Messrs. Sclater and Salvin omit 

 to state in their paper (P. Z. S. 1873, p. 454) that the black of the neck 

 in H. hrasiliensis is separated from that of the back by a white interval. 

 He cannot have read the diagnosis of this species as given in that paper, 

 where attention is expressly drawn to this character. 



