686 PARROT 
more easily kept alive on board ship and brought home, while, if 
it had not the merit of “speech,” it was almost certain to be of 
beautiful plumage. Yet so numerous is the group that even now 
new species of Parrots are not uncommonly recognized, though, 
looking to the way in which the most secluded parts of the world 
are being ransacked, we must soon come to an end of this. 
The home of the vast majority of Parrot-forms is unquestionably 
within the tropics, but the popular belief that Parrots are tropical 
birds only is a great mistake. In North America the Carolina Para- 
keet, Conurus carolinensis, at the beginning of the present century 
used to range in summer as high as the shores of Lakes Erie and 
Ontario—a latitude equal to that of the south of France ; and even 
within the last forty years it reached, according to trustworthy 
information, the junction of the Ohio and the Mississippi, though 
now its limits have been so much curtailed that its occurrence in 
any but the Gulf States is doubtful, and its extirpation as a species 
seems to be only a question of time! In South America, at least 
four species of Parrots are found in Chili or La Plata, and one, 
Conurus or Cyanolyseus patagonus, is pretty common on the bleak coast 
of the Strait of Magellan. In Africa, it is true that no species 
is known to extend to within some ten degrees of the tropic of 
Cancer ; but Pwocephalus robustus inhabits territories lying quite as 
far to the southward of the tropic of Capricorn. In India the 
northern range of the group is only bounded by the slopes of the 
Himalaya, and further to the eastward Parrots are not only abundant 
over the whole of the Malay Archipelago, as well as Australia and 
Tasmania, but two very well-defined Families are peculiar to New 
Zealand and its adjacent islands (KAKAPO and Nestor), while the 
genus Platycercus, or that section of it called Cyanorhynchus, has several 
representatives in the Region last named, one species, P. erythrotis, 
reaching the Macquarrie Islands in lat. 55° 8., the highest attained 
by any of the Order. No Parrot has recently inhabited the Pale- 
arctic area,” nor are Parrots represented by many different forms 
in either the Ethiopian or the Indian Region. In continental 
Asia the distribution of Parrots is rather remarkable. None extend 
further to the westward than the valley of the Indus, which, con- 
1 Of. inter alios, W. W. Cooke, Rep. Bird Migr. Mississippi, p. 124 (1888) ; 
W. Brewster, duk, 1889, p. 337; A. W. Butler, op. cit. 1892, pp. 49-56. 
2 A few remains of a Parrot have been recognized from the Miocene of the 
Allier in France, by Prof. A. Milne-Edwards (Ois. Foss. France, ii. p. 525, pl. 
ec.), and are said by him to shew the greatest resemblance to the common Grey 
Parrot of Africa, Psittacus erithacus, though having also some affinity to the 
Ring-necked Parakeet of the same country, Pa/xornis torquatus. He refers 
them, however, to the same genus as the former, under the name of Pstttacus 
VETTEAUXI. 
3 The statements that have been made, and even repeated by writers of 
authority, as to the occurrence of ‘‘a green parrot” in Syria (Chesney, Hxped. 
