I 



A REVISION OF THE INDO-CHINESE FORMS OF 

 THE AVIAN GENUS PRINIA 



By H. G. DEIGNAN 



Associate Curator, Division of Birds, U. S. National Museum 



One using the "Fauna of British India, Birds," 2d edition, can 

 scarcely fail to be astonished by the unnatural classification employed 

 in certain families in consequence of Stuart Baker's use in a generic, 

 or even subfamilial, sense of characters which, in themselves, are, at 

 most, of not more than subspecific importance. The pitfalls into which 

 such false evaluation may lead are nowhere more evident than in his 

 treatment of the Sylviidae, where, merely on a basis of whether the 

 species have lo or 12 rectrices, we find Phyllcrgatcs separated from 

 Orthotomus by 21 genera, while Prima is divided from Franklinia by 

 23 and from Cisficola by 24 genera. In the case of Franklinia, one 

 can find not a single character of generic importance by which the 

 putative genus may be upheld as distinct from Prinia and, once the 

 principle is accepted that the number of tail feathers may be related 

 to geographical variation within the species (as it is, indeed, generally 

 accepted in the cases of certain African warbler species), one hesitates 

 to accept even the specific distinctness of the Indian Prinia socialis 

 from the Indo-Chinese Franklinia rufescens. As for the so-called 

 genus Snya, which has not one character by which it may be distin- 

 guished from Prinia, it is hardly necessary to say more than that the 

 form called Snya crinigera cooki is only with difficulty differentiated 

 subspecifically from the Javanese bird accepted by all modern authors 

 as Prinia polychroa. The seasonal change in tail length, assumed by 

 Baker to have generic importance in Prinia, Suya, Franklinia, and 

 Laticilla, is reduced to its proper insignificance by the realization that 

 such variation gradually disappears, from north to south, even within 

 the limits of the several species as conceived by Baker himself. In 

 short, the genus Prinia, in this paper, is considered to be a poorly 

 defined aggregation of grass warblers, nearly alHed (through Incana) 

 to those placed by Lynes in Cisticola and, in Asia, embracing all the 

 forms distributed by Baker among Prinia, Suya, Laticilla, and 

 Franklinia. 



Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, Vol. 103, No. 3 



