760 QUEZAL 
species (with which he first became acquainted prior to 1810, from 
examining more than a dozen specimens obtained by the natural- 
history expedition to New Spain and kept in the palace of the 
Retiro near Madrid) under the name by which it is now commonly 
known, Pharomacrus mocinno,! in memory of a Mexican naturalist, 
Dr. Mocino. This fact, however, being almost unknown to the 
rest of the world, Gould, while pointing out Temminck’s error (Proc. 
Zool. Soc. 1835, p. 29), gave the species the name of J'rogon 
resplendens, which it bore for some time. Yet little or nothing 
was generally known about the bird until Delattre sent an account 
of his meeting- with it to the Echo du Monde Savant for 1843 
(reprinted Fev. Zool. for that year, pp. 163-165). In 1860 the 
nidification of the species, about which strange stories had been 
told to the naturalist last named, was determined, and its eggs, of 
a pale bluish-green, were procured by Mr. Robert Owen (Proc. Zool. 
Soc. 1860, p. 374; Ibis, 1861, p. 66, pl. ii. fig. 1); while further 
and fuller details of its habits (of which want of space forbids even 
an abstract here) were made known by Mr. Salvin (/dis, 1861, pp. 
138-149) from his own observation of this very local and remark- 
able species. Its chief home is in the mountains near Coban in 
Vera Paz, but it also inhabits forests in other parts of Guatemala 
at an elevation of from 6000 to 9000 feet. 
The Quezal is hardly so big as a Turtle-Dove. The cock has a 
fine yellow bill and a head bearing a rounded crest of filamentous 
feathers ; lanceolate scapulars overhang the wings, and from the 
rump spring the long flowing plumes which are so characteristic of 
? M. Sallé translated De la Llave’s very rare and interesting memoir (Rev. et 
Mag. de Zool. 1861, pp. 23-33). Bonaparte stated (Proc. Zool. Soc. 1837, p. 
101) that in 1826 he had proposed the name paradiseus for this species, and 
had communicated a notice of it to an American journal. There seems no 
reason to doubt his statement, and the journal was most likely the Contribu- 
tions of the Maclurian Lycewm, published at Philadelphia (1827-29), to which, 
as he says in his Sulla seconda edizione del Regno Animale del Barone Cuvier 
Osservazionit (Bologna: 1830, p. 80), he sent some remarks on Swainson’s 
Synopsis of the Birds of Mexico, and believed they had been printed there. But 
these Contributions unfortunately came to an end with the third number, and 
the only article by Bonaparte they contain is a Catalogue of the Birds of the 
United States (pp. 8-34), so that his criticism of Swainson’s paper (which had 
appeared in the Philosophical Magazine for 1827), though doubtless accepted for 
publication, has never seen the light. Dr. Hartlaub has printed (Nawmannia, 
1852, Hft. 2, p. 51) part of a letter from Duke Paul of Wiirtemberg, in which 
the writer says that in 1831 he communicated a description of P. mocinno to 
Cuvier, who thought that its long train-feathers had been put together arti- 
ficially. He possibly had in mind the celebrated feather treasured in the 
Escurial as having come from the wing of the Archangel Gabriel. This might 
be thought to have been a Quezal’s, but the author of Vathek who saw it in 
1787, says (Italy with Sketches of Spain, ii. p. 325) it was rose-coloured. 
