Letters, Extracts, Notices, <5fc. 657 



LIT. — Letters, Extracts, Notices, S^c. 



We have received the following letters, addressed " to the 

 Editors of The Ibis'^':— 



Sirs,— In your note (Ibis, July 1899, p. 480) on my 

 sketch of the fauna and flora of the Altai Mountains, 

 read before the Linnean Society in December last, you have 

 evidently failed to grasp the geographical features of the 

 country which I visited last year with Mr. Fletcher. You 

 speak of the Western Altai, which I never visited, though it 

 is quite true that Dr. Finsch, in his ' Reise nach West- 

 Sibirien' (Berlin, 1879), did pass through a part of the 

 Western Altai. He does not seem to have spent more than 

 10-15 days in the Altai Mountains or to have collected birds 

 to any great extent during his rapid journey through the 

 Irtysch and Buchtarraa valleys. Neither did he, so far as I 

 can make out, ever cross to the headwaters of the Obb, as 

 you say, or come within 100 miles or more of my route in the 

 mountains. Therefore, when I said that no ornithologist 

 had worked out the birds of the Altai, I think I was correct 

 and I am sure that any ornithologist who will visit 

 the South-eastern Altai, by which I mean the valleys of 

 the Tchuja, Bashkaus, and Tchulishman rivers — all tri- 

 butaries of the Obb — he will find a rich harvest of birds, 

 though I venture to think I have not left many new butter- 

 flies to be discovered. 



It is a fact to be remarked that, judging from the collec- 

 tions of Lepidoptera made by Kindermann in 1851 and 

 1853, and by Buckbeil more recently in the Upper Irtysch 

 and Buchtarma valleys, the fauna of that part of the Altai 

 (the South-western) is of a much more European character 

 than in the district where I collected ; and, as far as I am at 

 present able to judge, the fauna of the Alatau and Tarbagatai 

 mountains, where Dr. Finsch collected, has more affinity to 

 that of Turkestan than to that of the Eastern Altai and 

 Sayansk mountains, which appear to belong to the same 

 zoological subregion as Eastern Siberia. 



Yours &c., 



Colesborne, Aug. 9. H. J. Elwes. 



