1028 WEAVER-BIRD 
WEAVER-BIRD, the name! by which a group of some 250 
species is now usually called, from the elaborately interwoven 
nests that many of them build, some of the structures being of the 
most marvellous kind. By the older systematists such of these 
birds as were then known were distributed among the genera 
Oriolus, Loxia, Emberiza and Fringilla; and it was Cuvier who in 
1817 first brought together the scattered forms, comprising them 
in a genus Ploceus. Others were subsequently referred to its 
SYCOBROTUS. PLOCEus. 
(After Swainson.) 
neighbourhood, and especially the genus /idua (WIDOW-BIRD) with 
its allies, so as to make of them a subfamily Ploceinx, which in 
1847 was raised by Prof. Cabanis to the rank of a Family Ploceide, 
equivalent to that of Fringillide (FINCH) in which they had been 
included, on the ground that the Finches have but nine primary 
quills in their wing, while the Weaver-birds have ten. Following 
Sundevall, Dr. Sharpe (Cat. B. Br. Mus. xiii. pp. 198-511) divides 
the Ploceide into two subfamilies—Viduine (with 42 genera and 
PYRENESTES, : PYROMELENA. 
(After Swainson.) 
156 species) having the outermost primary very short, and Ploceine 
(with 20 genera and 92 species) in which it is large—a_ proceeding 
that is confessedly artificial and not to be recommended, since it 
obscures the very natural group of Viduine proper by associating 
hardly be said to have any near ally, for neither of the Neotropical and Antil- 
lean genera, Ptilogonys and Myiodectes (often erroneously spelt Myiadestes), can 
as yet be safely declared of kin to it, as has been alleged. 
1 First bestowed in this form apparently by Stephens in 1826 (Gen. Zool. xiv. 
p- 34); but in 1782 Latham (Synopsis, 1. p. 435) had called the ‘‘ Zroupiale du 
Sénégal” of Buffon the ‘‘ Weever Oriolo,” from its habit of entwining the wires 
of the cage in which it was kept with such vegetable fibres as it could get, and 
hence in 1788 Gmelin named it Oriolus textor, In 1800 Daudin used the term 
“* Tisserin” for several species of the Linnean genus Loxia, and this was adopted 
some years later by Cuvier as the equivalent of his Ploceus, as mentioned in the text. 
