﻿stejneger] birds of genus cinclus 4 2 9 



black-bellied Scandinavian dipper as found in western Norway 

 might then be suspected of having reached its presenl home from 

 the west, in which case we would have a most striking parallel to the 

 case of the small race of red deer in western Norway, with appar- 

 ent relatives in North Africa, Sardinia and Scotland. 1 The sugg* -- 

 tion that even the Scandinavian dipper is of double origin (also 

 parallel with the red deer) is borne out to some extent by Professor 

 Robert Collett's record of some specimens from the neighborhood of 

 Kristiania, Norway, which seem to come pretty close to the Central 

 European C. merula (Nyl Mag. Naturvid., xxm, pt. iv, 1K77. p. 

 105). On the other hand, [ would call attention to the lad that von 

 rschusi-Schmidhofren at the time he diagnosed the British dipper 

 as Cinclus cinclus britannicus 2 indicated certain similarities to the 

 typical C. cinclus. A great obstacle to a correct appreciation of the 

 relationship of the dippers in Europe is the insufficiency of our 

 knowledge of their distribution in Russia. We do not even approxi- 

 mately know the affinities of the dippers which occur in the Ural 

 Mountains. 



It is not even certain that the uniformly dark East Asiatic type 

 is trenchantly distinct from the pied one. Two forms have been 

 described, viz., C. saturatus Dresser, from the Baical region, and 

 C. middendorfd Sushkin, from the neighboring Sayan Mountains 

 (if these are not identical) which seem to be somewhat intermediate. 

 In that same general region we have a number of other forms, more 

 or less closely allied, yet showing such extremes as C. leucogaster 

 with entirely white underside and C. pallasii, uniformly dusky above 

 and below, so that one is almost tempted to regard those mountain 

 systems (Suess's "alter Scheitel ") as the original radiation center, 

 though the truth may be that the various types in their wanderings 

 have crossed each others' ways just here. 



Various authors, for instance Taczanowski, have suggested that 

 >ome of these intermediate forms are the result of hybridization. 

 While such an assumption might account for certain individual 

 specimens, it does not explain the whole situation. I may here call 

 attention to the fact that nearly all the material, upon which they 

 have based their conclusion, consists of winter specimens which may 



'See Stejneger, Amer. Natural, xxxv, Feb.. 1901, pp. no-ill. 



2 Ornith. Jahrb., xm, 1902, p. 69. It would seem as if Latham's name 

 Turdus gularis (1801) must stand for the British bird, as it is specifically 

 based upon a specimen from Penrith. Moreover, von Tschusi is not the 

 first author to recognize the British bird as distinct and give it a name. 

 That was done in 1890, by Leon Olph-Galliard, Contrib. Faune Ornith. 

 Europe Occid., fasc. xxx, p. 12. 



