GUIRA—GULL 401 
Guttera has been given) in which a thick tuft of feathers ornaments 
the top of the head. ‘This contains four or five species, all inhabit- 
ing some part or other of Africa, the best 
known being the JN. cristata from Sierra 
Leone and other places on the western 
coast. This bird, apparently mentioned by 
Maregrave more than 200 years ago, but 
first described by Pallas, is remarkable for 
the structure—unique, if not possessed by 
its representative forms—of its FURCULA, Guinea Fowl. 
where the head, instead of being the thin mast tes se 
plate found in all other Gallinz, is a hollow cup opening upwards, 
into which the trachea dips, and then emerges on its way to the 
lungs. Allied to the genus Numida, but readily distinguished 
therefrom among other characters by the possession of spurs, are 
two rare forms, Agelastes and Phasidus, both from Western Africa. 
Of their habits nothing is known. All these birds are beautifully 
figured in Mr. Elliot’s Monograph of the Phasianidx, from drawings 
by Mr. Wolf. 
GUIRA, a Spanish-American name, occasionally to be found 
since Willughby’s time in English books, but applied to so many 
birds of different kinds as to convey no definite meaning unless with 
a qualification, and then possibly not always. 
GUIT-GUIT, a name, presumably in imitation of the cry of a 
bird, used almost indefinitely for any species of the Neotropical 
genera Cwreba, DACNIS and their allies (cf. QUIT). 
GULL (Welsh, Guwylan; Breton, Gowlen; French, Goeland) the 
name now commonly used, to the almost entire exclusion of the 
old English Mew (Icelandic, Mdfur; Danish, MJaage; Swedish, 
Mase; German, Meve ; Dutch, Meeww ; French, Mouette), for a group 
of Sea-birds widely and commonly known, all belonging to the 
genus Larus of lLinneeus, which subsequent systematists have 
broken up in a very arbitrary and often absurd fashion. The 
Family Laridx is composed of two chief groups, Larine and 
Sternine—the Gulls and the TERNS, though two other subfamilies 
are frequently counted, the Skuas (Stfercorariing), and that formed 
by the single genus Phynchops, the SKIMMERS ; but there seems no 
strong reason why the former should not be referred to the Larine, 
and the latter to the Sternine. 
Taking the Gulls in their restricted sense, Mr. Howard 
Saunders, who subjected the group to a rigorous revision (Proc. 
Zool. Soc. 1878, pp. 152-211), admitted forty-nine species of them, 
which he placed in five genera instead of the many which some 
prior investigators had sought to establish. Two or three more 
species might now be added. Of the genera recognized by him, 
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