298 Lord Walden on Mr. Allan Hume's 



by dissection. The inconvenient fact stated by Ilerr v. 

 Pelzcln of the Nicobar female having a red maxilla is thus 

 disposed of by Dr. Finsch's friendly censor, now growing 

 " weary of exposing these " (Dr. Finsch^s) " perpetual and 

 perverse blunders^' {t.c. p. 25). This specimen, ''allow me 

 to inform our author, was unquestionably a male, and had 

 been, dissection or no dissection, wrongly sexed ! Y/e shot 

 and sexed 25 adults of this species .... and we know beyond 

 the possibility of a doubt, that Dr. Cantor and Blytli were 

 perfectly correct," etc. etc. (/. c). It is true that in a note 

 quoted by Mr. Moore (P. Z. S. J 859, p. 454) Dr. Cantor 

 states that the female has a black bill, and it was Mr. Blyth's 

 foregone conclusion ; for he says " the bill wholly black, as I 

 suggested it would be in this sex" {op. cit. 1846, p. 51, 

 note) . But Dr. Cantor's opinion on an ornithological question 

 could not be accepted as conclusive. An intimate friend of 

 my own (many a friendly Manilla have we smoked together in 

 Fort William) , Dr. Cantor was no ornithologist. An excellent 

 ichthyologist and herpetologist, he knew little, and professed to 

 know nothing, about birds. What Mr. Hume was going to 

 " know beyond the possibility of a doubt " in 1874 we again 

 humbly submit, at the risk of being tedious, could not have 

 been known to Dr. Finsch full five years before. 



I have now shown that the major part of Mr. Hume's cri- 

 ticisms of Dr. Finsch's treatment of these eleven species of 

 the genus Palaornis are in a less or greater degree mainly 

 founded on perversions, misstatements, or misrepresentations 

 of the established facts existing when Dr. Finsch was writing 

 ' Die Papageien,' or else on trivial inaccuracies of expression. 

 Also that in no single instance do Dr. Finsch's references to 

 Jerdon, Blyth, or other Indian naturalists, when fairly inter- 

 preted, exhibit even a breath of discourtesy or absence of de- 

 ference, consistent with freedom of judgment, to any opinion 

 expressed, or facts narrated, by them. And although Dr. 

 Finsch may, by the light of recent investigations, be shown to 

 have arrived at some erroneous conclusions, they were mostly 

 logical inferences to draw from the conflicting evidence on 

 record at the time he wrote. Towards the close of his article 



