686 PARROT 



more easily kept alive on board ship and brought home, while, if 

 it had not the merit of " speech," it was almost certain to be of 

 beautiful plumage. Yet so numerous is the group that even now 

 new species of Parrots are not uncommonly recognized, though, 

 looking to the Avay in which the most secluded parts of the world 

 are being ransacked, we must soon come to an end of this. 



The home of the vast majority of Parrot-forms is unquestionably 

 within the tropics, but the popular belief that Parrots are tropical 

 birds only is a great mistake. In North America the Carolina Para- 

 keet, Conurus carolinensis, at the beginning of the present century 

 used to range in summer as high as the shores of Lakes Erie and 

 Ontario — a latitude equal to that of the south of France ; and even 

 within the last forty years it reached, according to trustworthy 

 information, the junction of the Ohio and the Mississippi, though 

 now its limits have been so much curtailed that its occurrence in 

 any but the Gulf States is doubtful, and its extirpation as a species 

 seems to be only a question of time.^ In South America, at least 

 four species of Parrots are found in Chili or La Plata, and one, 

 Conurus or Cyanolyseus patagonus, is pretty common on the bleak coast 

 of the Strait of Magellan. In Africa, it is true that no species 

 is known to extend to within some ten degrees of the tropic of 

 Cancer ; but Fc&ocephalus rohustus inhabits territories lying quite as 

 far to the southward of the tropic of Capricorn. In India the 

 northern range of the group is only bounded by the slopes of the 

 Himalaya, and further to the eastward Parrots are not only abundant 

 over the whole of the Malay Archipelago, as well as Australia and 

 Tasmania, but two very well-defined Families are peculiar to New 

 . Zealand and its adjacent islands (Kakapo and Nestor), while the 



h(XvUfi^ genus Platycercus, or that section of it called Cyan o rhmchus^ has several 

 J^ representatives in the Eegion last named, one species, P. erythrotis, 



"^""^ reaching the Macquarrie Islands in lat. 55° S., the highest attained 



by any of the Order. No Parrot has recently inhabited the Palse- 

 arctic area,^ nor are Parrots represented by many different forms 

 in either the Ethiopian or the Indian Region. In continental 

 Asia the distribution of Parrots is rather remarkable. None extend 

 further to the westward than the valley of the Indus,^ which, con- 



^ Of. inter alios, W. W. Cooke, Eep. Bird Migr. Mississipjn, p. 124 (1888) ; 

 W. Brewster, Auk, 1889, p. 337 ; A. W. Butler, op. cit. 1892, pp. 49-56. 



2 A few remains of a Parrot have been recognized from the Miocene of the 

 Allier in France, by Prof. A. Milne-Edwards {Ois. Foss. France, ii. p. 525, pi. 

 cc), and are said by him to shew the greatest resemblance to the common Grey 

 Parrot of Africa, Psittacus erithacus, though having also some affinity to the 

 Ring-necked Parakeet of the same country, Palscornis torq^uatus. He refers 

 them, however, to the same genus as the former, under the name of Psittacus 

 verreauxi. 



^ The statements that have been made, and even repeated by writers of 

 authority, as to the occurrence of " a green parrot" in Syria (Chesney, Exped. 



