76o QUEZAL 



species (with which he first became acquainted prior to 1810, from 

 examining more than a dozen specimens obtained by the natural- 

 history expedition to New Spain and kept in the palace of the 

 Retiro near Madrid) under the name by which it is now commonly 

 known, Pharomacrus mocinno,^ in memory of a Mexican naturalist, 

 Dr. Mociiio. This fact, however, being almost unknown to the 

 rest of the world, Gould, while pointing out Temminck's error {Proc. 

 Zool. Soc. 1835, p. 29), gave the species the name of Trogon 

 resplendens, which it bore for some time. Yet little or nothing 

 was generally known about the bird until Delattre sent an account 

 of his meeting with it to the Echo du Monde Savant for 1843 

 {reprinted Bev. Zool. for that year, pp. 163-165). In 1860 the 

 nidification of the species, about which strange stories had been 

 told to the naturalist last named, was determined, and its eggs, of 

 a pale bluish-green, were procured by Mr. Robert Owen (Proc. Zool. 

 Soc. 1860, p. 374; Ibis, 1861, p. 66, pi. ii. fig. 1); while further 

 and fuller details of its habits (of which want of space forbids even 

 an abstract here) were made known by Mr. Salvin (Ibis, 1861, pp. 

 138-149) from his own observation of this very local and remark- 

 able species. Its chief home is in the- mountains near Coban in 

 Vera Paz, but it also inhabits forests in other parts of Guatemala 

 at an elevation of from 6000 to 9000 feet. 



The Quezal is hardly so big as a Turtle-Dove. The cock has a 

 fine yellow bill and a head bearing a rounded crest of filamentous 

 feathers ; lanceolate scapulars overhang the wings, and from the 

 rump spring the long flowing plumes which are so characteristic of 



^ M. Salle translated De la Llave's very rare and interesting memoir (Bev. et 

 Mag. de Zool. 1861, pp. 23-33). Bonaparte stated {Proc. Zool. Soc. 1837, p. 

 101) that in 1826 he had proposed the name paradiseus for this species, and 

 had communicated a notice of it to an American journal. There seems no 

 reason to doubt his statement, and the journal was most likely the Contribu- 

 tions of the Maclurian Lyceum, publisJied at Philadelphia (1827-29), to which, 

 as he says in his Sulla secondco edizione del Regno Animale del Barone Cuvier 

 Osservazioni (Bologna : 1830, p. 80), he sent some remarks on Swainson's 

 Synopsis of the Birds of Mexico, and believed they had been 2:)rinted there. But 

 these Contributions unfortunately came to an end with the third number, and 

 the only article by Bonaparte they contain is a Catalogue of the Birds of the 

 United States (pp. 8-34), so that his criticism of Swainson's paper (which had 

 appeared in the Philosophical Magazine for 1827), though doubtless accepted for 

 publication, has never seen the light. Dr. Hartlaub has printed [Naumannia, 

 1852, Hft. 2, p. 51) part of a letter from Duke Paul of Wiirtemberg, in which 

 the writer says that in 1831 he communicated a description of P. mocinno to 

 Cuvier, who thought that its long train-feathers had been jnit together arti- 

 ficially. He possibly had in mind the celebrated feather treasured in the 

 Escurial as having come from the wing of the Archangel Gabriel. This might 

 be thought to have been a Quezal's, but the autlior of Vathek who saw it in 

 1787, says {Italy with Sketches of Spain, ii. p. 325) it was rose-coloured. 



