290 Lord VValden on Mr. Allan Hume's 



Hume^s observations on Dr. Finsch^s account of this species. 

 Mr. Hume carefully abstains from stating the name of a single 

 observer with whose investigations Dr. Finsch ought to have 

 been acquainted, and " in the face of whose evidence " Dr. 

 Finsch " flies." Nor does he dare to name one of the " dozen 

 different observers " whom " our author absolutely ignores," 

 nor of the " naturalists " who " have already recorded to a 

 similar effect." Since Layard and Kelaart, that is since 

 1868, the only Ceylon naturalists who have written in any 

 accessible, even if any, scientific journal on Ceylon ornitho- 

 logy are Holdsworth, Vincent Legge, and Hugh Nevill ; and 

 the first is the only one who has touched on the point at 

 issue, and then only in 1872. 



The next Indian species known to Mr. Hume, Palaornis 

 melanorhynchus , Wagler, was divided by Dr. Finsch, guided 

 by the evidence existing in 1868 (Papag. ii. pp. 66, 70), into 

 two species — P. lathami, Finsch, with the maxilla red in both 

 sexes, and P. melanorhynchus, Wagler, with the bill, in both 

 sexes, black. Subsequent investigations have led to the con- 

 clusion that these are sexual diff'erences, and that only the 

 adult male possesses a red maxilla, while the young birds and 

 adult females possess black bills [conf. Walden, Ibis, 1873, 

 p. 297, no. 2). For his conclusion, erroneous though it 

 may now prove to be. Dr. Finsch is assailed with a volley 

 of silly invective. Let, then, the facts before Dr. Finsch 

 the facts recorded up to 1868, be examined. In the first 

 place both Jerdon and Blyth confounded, by erroneous iden- 

 tification, the Indian bird and the Javan and Bornean P. alex- 

 andri (Birds of Ind. i. p. 263; Ibis, 1866, p. 353), and Dr. 

 Finsch had therefore good grounds for being uncertain as to 

 which of the two species they referred. Jerdon further de- 

 scribed the bird as having "a large red"^ patch on the wing, 

 formed by most of the lesser and some of the median coverts " 

 (/. c), which is not the case, as Dr. Finsch acutely remarks. 

 Hodgson regarded the black-billed bird as belonging to a di- 

 stinct species and named it P. nigrirostris (Gray, Zool. Misc. 

 p. 85, 1844), and in the ' Calcutta Jom-nal of Natural History' 

 * I suspect that the word '' red " is a slip of the peu for yellow. 



