1877.] . INHABITING THE INDIAN EEGION. 439 



by Captain Roberts of a representative of the genus in Peninsular India, which, however, he 

 never saw, and which up to this date remains unidentified. Not many years elapsed before 

 Blyth (1847) published an account of a sixth species, obtained at Malacca by Mr. Frith, 

 B. affinis ; and two years later he received from Darjeeling the fragments of two nestlings, which 

 he identified as belonging to this species [l. c). In Ceylon, Layard discovered and so added 

 another species to the list (which may or may not be the same as the South-Indian form) — a 

 species described by Blyth (1849) under Layard's title of B. moniliger. The whole of these six 

 or seven species were in rufous or rufous-brown plumage; but in 1850 Bonaparte (/. /. c.) made 

 known the fact that each sex in one species at least {B. javensis) wore a plumage peculiar to itself 

 — a statement reiterated in wider terms and confirmed by Prof. Schlegel {I. i. c.) four years later. 

 This important fact did not deter Mr. G. R. Gray from describing in 1857 a bird in grey and 

 brown mottled plumage, obtained the year before by Mr. Hodgson's collectors at an elevation of 

 3000 or 4000 feet behind Darjeeling, as belonging not only to a new species but to a distinct 

 genus — Otothrix hodgsoni. 



From the year 1849 until the date of the visit of the 'Challenger' Expedition to the 

 Philippines, the efforts of naturalists, while considerably increasing and correcting our knowledge 

 of the geographical distribution of the Batrachosfomi, had not made known any new species. 

 Mr. Blyth had already announced the occurrence of B. auritus in Malacca ; and Mr. Low has 

 discovered it in Borneo. Mr. Motley obtained B. cornutus at Banjer massing, in Borneo; and 

 the Marchese Doria found it at Sarawak. Tickell has figured and described B. affinis from 

 Burma ; and Lieut. Wardlaw Ramsay discovered the same species in the plumage of Otothrix 

 liodgsoni on the Karen-nee hills in that country. The range of B. stellatus has been made to 

 include Malacca by Mr. Blyth's researches, and extended to Borneo (Sarawak) by Marchese G. 

 Doria. Mr. Bourdillon has quite recently discovered in Travancore examples of a species of the 

 genus which, while confirming Dr. Jerdon's statement that one of its members occurred in 

 Southern India, may prove to be a distinct form. And, lastly, the Philippine island Mindanao 

 has been added to the area of the genus (as restricted), by the discovery there made by the 

 naturalists of the ' Challenger ' Expedition of a large species. Examples of the genus, so far as 

 at present recorded, therefore present themselves in Ceylon, Southern India (Wynaad, Travancore), 

 the vicinity of Darjeeling, Tung-goo* and Karen-nee in Burma, Malacca, Sumatra, Borneo, Java, p.z.S.1877 

 and Mindanao. P- '^^^ 



It was an a jjriori and a natural inference of many ornithologists that the bright-plumaged 

 birds of the genus Batrachostomus must be males, and the grey dull-coloured birds either feraales 

 or immature examples, or else that they belonged to totally distinct species; for the Batrachostomi 

 exhibit two very distinct phases of plumage — the bright rufous or rufous bay (when adult), and 

 the speckled, spotted, and striated grey and brown and rufous-brown dress. So very different an 

 aspect do individuals falling under either one or other of these two phases assume, that it was 

 long before some authors suspected that they in fact belonged to the same species, though to the 

 opposite sexes. This conclusion cannot even now be considered as placed beyond doubt (for the 

 Frogmouths may be dimorphic) ; and it is therefore proposed to state and examine the evidence 

 on which it rests. Bonaparte (Cousp. i. p. 57, no. 2) seems to have been the first writer who 

 * [Le(/e rei;tius the Tonghoo district in Burma, Karen-nee, Malacca, &c. — Ed.] 



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