Coast and Islands of South-eastern Siam. 741 



two races, basing their distinction on the amount of white 

 on the tail-feathers. 



The typical race, founded on Latham's Great Billed Tody 

 is supposed to have little or no white in the tail and to be 

 confined to Borneo, while the form inhabiting Sumatra and 

 the Malay Peninsula north to Tenasserim and Siam has the 

 outer webs of the three outer tail-feathers with white on the 

 inner webs. For this race the earliest name available is 

 E. lemniscatus Raffles, founded on sj>ecimens from " the 

 interior of Sumatra," probably inland from Bencoolen. 



Hume {loc. cit.) has pointed out that in regard to conti- 

 nental specimens, these differences are not constant, there 

 being great variation in the amount of white on the tail in 

 the series examined by him. Four specimens from the west 

 coast of Sumatra, which are practically topotypes of E. lem- 

 niscatus, have in two cases practically no white on the tail, 

 ■while in the other two it is much less than in most Malayan 

 specimens, though these can be matched by a specimen from 

 Parit, central Perak. Most Bornean specimens have traces 

 of white, though in the majority the white is small in extent, 

 often little more than a pale patch, and does not extend to 

 more than two pairs of feathers. 



On the face of the evidence before us we should be forced 

 to regard the typical race C. m. macrorhynchus as occurring 

 in both Borneo and western Sumatra, while the continental 

 form, to which the name C m. malaccensis Salvad. would 

 have to be applied, would inhabit the mainland and east 

 and south Sumatra. Possibly this is really the case, as west 

 Sumatra, west of the main range, is much older land than 

 the east and south of the island, in which districts the 

 fauna is almost purely Malaccan with no distinctive species. 

 The more obvious course is to regard the differential cha- 

 racters as so unstable and plastic as not to justify separation 

 of the species into geographical races on their account. 



The above Siamese specimens, which are both young, have 

 the white spots on the tail distinctly tinged with ochreous, 

 ■which is apparently not due to stain. 



3d2 



