FRINGILLIDiE — THE FINCHES. 



491 



twigs, and thinly lined with coarse hairs and fine shreds of inner bark. 

 Its external diameter is a little less than four inches, the rim being almost 

 perfectly circular ; the cavity is an inch and a half deep by two and a half 

 broad. 



The one egg is pale blue, the large end rather thickly spattered with fine 

 dots of black and ashy-lilac; is regularly or rather slightly elongate-oval, 

 the small end rather obtuse. It measures .80 of an inch in length by .56 in 

 breadth. 



Genus ^GIOTHUS, Caban. 



Acanthis, Bonap. Conspectus, 1850, not of Beclistein, 1802, nor of Keys. & Bias. 1840. 

 jEgiothus, Cabanis, Mus. Hein. 1851, 161. (Type, Fringllla linaria, Linn.) — Coues, Pr. 

 Acad. Nat. Sc. Phil. 1861, 373 ; 186.3, 40 ; 1869, 180. 



Sp. Char. Bill very short, conical, acutely pointed, the outlines sometimes concave; the 

 commissure straight ; the base of the 

 upper mandible and the nostrils con- 

 cealed by stiff, appressed bristly feathers ; 

 middle of the mandible having several 

 ridges parallel with the culmen. In- 

 ner lateral toe rather the longer, its 

 claw reaching the middle of the middle 

 claw ; the hind toe rather longer, its 

 claw longer than the digital portion. 

 Wings very long, reaching the middle 

 of the tail ; second quill a little longer 

 than the first and third. Tail deeply 

 forked. 



jEgiot/ius Unarms. 



Difficult as it sometimes is to define with precision the characters of closely 

 allied species of birds, there are few genera wliere this is the case more 

 strikingly than in ^Egiothus. Leaving out of view the peculiar European 

 species, it has been a mooted question whether North America, including 

 Greenland, possesses one, two, or six species, owing to the strictly boreal 



distribution of these birds, and the fact 

 that their summer resorts are seldom in- 

 vaded by the naturalist. The necessary 

 means of determining the proper distri- 

 bution of the forms and the variations 

 with season, locality, and sex, are scarce- 

 ly to be met with in any public mu- 

 seum, that of the Smithsonian Institu- 

 tion, however, being the most complete in 

 this respect. 



To Dr. Coues, as quoted above, we owe 

 the most satisfactory indications of the different species and varieties, his 

 papers in the Proceedings of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences 



uEgiothus Unarms. 



