44 BLOOD-BIRD—BLUEBIRD 
The function of the blood is this: The arterial blood in the 
capillaries of the body gives off its oxygen to the tissues of the 
body ; the lymph, charged with the nutritive elements derived 
through the process of digestion, bathes the same tissues by leaving 
the capillaries, and is collected again into lymphatic vessels, being 
ultimately emptied into the big veins of the body, to be mixed 
again with the deoxydized blood returning likewise through the 
veins from the capillaries of the whole body. All this exhausted 
blood is, together with the lymph, received into the right auricle of 
the heart, thence pumped through the right ventricle and the 
pulmonary arteries into the capillaries of the lungs, there to give 
up its carbonic acid, and to be charged again with oxygen. 
Returning through the pulmonary veins into the left auricle, and 
thence into the left ventricle, it is forced by the contraction of the 
latter into the arteries of the body to commence its circulation 
anew. 
The lymph is a fluid like the blood-plasm, slightly yellowish 
or colourless and containing only white, but no red, blood- 
corpuscles. 
BLOOD-BIRD, one of the species of the genus Myzomela, 
belonging to the Meliphagide (HONEY-SUCKER), so called in New 
South Wales — lM. sanguinolenta (Latham). (Gould, Handb. B. 
Australia, 1. p. 555.) 
BLOOD-OLPH, a not uncommon local name of the BULL- 
FINCH. 
BLOOD-PHEASANT, the Anglo-Indian name for the Ithaginis 
cruentus of ornithologists, one of the most beautiful game-birds of 
the mountains of Eastern Nepal and Sikkim, so called from the 
blood-red blotches with which its otherwise green plumage is 
diversified. A second species of the genus, J. geoffroyi, has been 
described from Northern China. By some systematists they are 
referred to the subfamily Perdiciny, by others to the Phasianine. 
(Jerdon, B. India, iii. p. 522.) 
BLUEBIRD, in North America the appropriate name of the no 
less familiar than favourite Sialia wilsoni, or sialis of ornithology, 
and of its congeners S. mexicana or occidentalis! and S. arctica :— 
the first, with a chestnut throat and breast, being an abundant bird 
on the eastern side of the continent, appearing also in Bermuda ; 
the second, with the middle of the back and breast chestnut, taking 
1 By some writers S. mexicana is regarded as distinct from S. occidentalis, 
and there seems little doubt that S. aziwea of Central America may be considered 
a good species. Mr. Seebohm (Cat. B. Brit. Afus. v. p. 328) places in this 
genus the Grandala cxlicolor of the Himalaya and other mountain-ranges in 
Asia. 
