1026 WAVE V—WAX WING 
called Wattle-birds though not possessing any appendage to justify 
the name (cf. Gould, Hand. b. Austral. i. pp. 534-544 ; Gadow, 
Cat. B. Br. Mus. ix. pp. 262-266), while the rare and apparently 
extinct Chetoptila angustipluma of Hawaii, though from a locality so 
far off, wonld seem to be near of kin (cf. Wilson and Evans, B. 
Sandw. Isl.). 
WAVEY, a name long used by the residents in the Hudson’s 
Bay Territory, apparently for any species of Wild Goosk (p. 374), 
but especially for those of the genus Chen (Hearne, Journey, p. 442). 
WAXBILL, the name in use in Edwards’s time (1751) for the 
well-known little cage-bird, the Loxia astrild of Linnxus and Estrilda 
astrild of modern ornithology, one of the Ploceide (WEAVER-BIRD), 
but also applied to several other species, more or less allied, which 
have the bill like sealing-wax, though they are placed by Dr. Sharpe 
(Cat. B. Br. Mus, xiii.) in almost as many distinct genera. 
WAXWING, apparently first so-called by Stephens in 1817 
(Gen. Zool. x. 420), having been before known as the ‘Silk-tail ” 
(Phil. Trans. 1685, p. 1161)—a literal 
rendering of the German Sceidenschwanz 
—or “Chatterer”—the prefix ‘‘German,” 
“Bohemian” or “ Waxen” being often 
also. apphed.  Stephens’s convenient 
name has now been generally adopted, 
since the bird is readily distinguished 
from almost all others by the curious expansion of the shaft of 
some of its wing-feathers at the tip into a flake that looks like 
scarlet sealing-wax, while its exceedingly silent habit makes the 
name ‘‘CHATTERER ” wholly inappropriate (cf. page 85). It is the 
Ampelis garrulus of Linnzus and of more recent ornithologists.! 
The Waxwing is a bird that for many years excited vast in- 
terest. An irregular winter-visitant, sometimes in countless hordes, 
to the central and some parts of southern Europe, it was of old 
time looked upon as the harbinger of war, plague, or death, and, 
while its harmonious coloration and the grace of its form were 
attractive, the curiosity with which its irregular appearances were 
Waxwine. (After Swainson.) 
1 Linneus had, as is well known, no conception of what is meant by the 
modern idea of a ‘‘ type” ; but none can doubt that, if such a notion had been 
entertained by him, he would have declared his type-species to be that to which 
the name was first applied, viz. the present, and hence those systematists are 
wrong who would remove this to a genus variously called Bombycilla, Bombict- 
phora, or, most absurd of all, Bombicivora. The birds which ought to be re- 
moved from his Ampelis are those which are now generally recognized as forming 
a Family Cotingide (CHATTERER), allied to the Pipride (MANAKIN), and like 
them peculiar to the Neotropical Fauna, in which they constitute a very natural 
group (INTRODUCTION). 
