GUIRA—GULL 401 



Guttera has been given) in which a thick tuft of feathers ornaments 

 the top of the head. This contains four or five species, all inhabit- 

 ing some part or other of Africa, the best 

 known being the N. cristata from Sierra 

 Leone and other places on the western 

 coast. This bird, apparently mentioned by 

 Marcgi'ave more than 200 years ago, but 

 first described by Pallas, is remarkable for 

 the structure- — unique, if not possessed by 

 its representative forms — ^^of its FuRCULA, guinea fowl. 



where the head, instead of being the thin 



plate found in all other Galliim, is a hollow cup opening upwards, 

 into which the trachea dips, and then emerges on its way to the 

 lungs. Allied to the genus Nwniida, but readily distinguished 

 therefrom among other characters by the possession of spurs, are 

 two rare forms, Agelastes and Fhasidus, both from Western Africa. 

 Of their habits nothing is known. All these birds ai-e beautifully 

 figured in Mr. Elliot's Monograph of the Phasianidx, from drawings 

 by Mr. Wolf. 



GUIRA, a Spanish-American name, occasionally to be found 

 since Willughby's time in English books, but applied to so many 

 birds of diff"erent kinds as to convey no definite meaning unless with 

 a qualification, and then possibly not always. 



GUIT-GUIT, a name, presumably in imitation of the cry of a 

 bird, used almost indefinitely for any species of the Neotropical 

 genera Csereba, Dacnis and their allies (cf. Quit). 



GULL (Welsh, Gwylan ; Breton, Goulen ; French, Goeland) the 

 name now commonly used, to the almost, entire exclusion of the 

 old English Mew (Icelandic, Mdfur ; Danish, Maage ; Swedish, 

 Mase ; German, Meve ; Dutch, Meeuw ; French, Mouette), for a group 

 of Sea-birds widely and commonly known, all belonging to the 

 genus Larus of Linnaeus, which subsequent systematists have 

 broken up in a very arbitrary and often absurd fashion. The 

 Family Laridse is composed of two chief groups, Larinai and 

 Sterninsp, — the Gulls and the Terns, though two other subfamilies 

 are frequently counted, the Skuas (Stercorarmix), and that formed 

 by the single genus Rhynchops, the Skimmers ; but there seems no 

 strong reason why the former should not be referred to the Larinm, 

 and the latter to the Sternina'. 



Taking the Gulls in their restricted sense, Mr. Howard 

 Saunders, who subjected the group to a rigorous revision {Proc. 

 Zool. Soc. 1878, pp. 152-211), admitted forty-nine species of them, 

 which he placed in five genera instead of the many which some 

 prior investigators had sought to establish. Two or three more 

 species might now be added. Of the genera recognized by him, 



26 



