60 BREWSTER’S WARBLER. 
of all kinds, even of the most remote relationship, will evince this sympathy with 
their neighbors in affliction. As an instance to the point: one day in this very 
place Dr. Tyler caught a young fledgling Veery in his hat: in an instant the 
cries of the young bird gathered around us every feathered inhabitant of the 
swamp. 
On two occasions the male Brewster’s Warbler, in the absence of the male 
Golden-wing, was seen to engage in what seemed to us a vicious pursuit of the 
female, only to meet with a repulse. 
When highly excited by the intrusion of a squirrel or any other marauder, 
both sexes of the Helminthophilae,’ but more especially the female, emit a series 
of peculiar scolding burry notes which suggest the song of the Short-billed 
Marsh Wren. 
By the fourteenth of June the scanty clothing of the nestlings in the shape 
of scattered patches of gray down was reinforced by the incipient feathers of 
the so-called first or juvenile plumage. These (on the back) were of an obscure 
olive-gray, but on the wings the future transverse bars of the median and greater 
wing-coverts were apparent as yellowish pin feathers. The throats were still 
bare, the skin thereof being of a reddish-brown hue. On the following day (June 
15) the feathers of the throat were just visible, of an olive- or yellowish-gray color. 
On the morning of the seventeenth of June the young were all out of the 
nest, clinging to the low shrubs and Cinnamon Ferns near the nest, a foot or two 
above the ground. They are now olive-colored on the crown, olivaceous gray 
on the back; the wings are marked by two transverse widely separated yellowish 
bars; the under parts are ash-colored tinged with yellow; there are no throat 
or cheek patches, or clear traces of a trans-ocular streak; the tail feathers, 
just beginning to sprout, are olive-gray, or olive-slate, like the primary quills 
of the wings. In appearance and habit they were grotesque little fellows, 
1 Mr. Oberholser (Smithsonian Mise. Coll., Quarterly Issue, May 13, 1905, 48, p. 66) holds that the 
name Vermivora must supplant Helminthophila Ridgway (1882). The genus Vermivora was established 
by Swainson in an essay published in the Zoological Journal, April-July, 1827, 3, p. 170. The genus 
was there diagnosed and its type species, Sylvia vermivora, explicitly designated as well as implied by 
tautonomy. In a later-written paper (Philos. Mag., June, 1827, 1, p. 434), dealing exclusively with a 
collection of birds discovered in Mexico by the Bullocks, Swainson assigned Sylvia solitaria Wils. (= S. 
pinus Linn.), which he thought to be congeneric with S. vermivora, to the genus Vermivora, referring 
back to his earlier paper in the Zoological Journal for the foundation of the genus. In the later-written 
paper S. pinus appears as the only species in the genus Vermivora merely because it was the only species 
of the group represented in the Bullock collection. 
Swainson’s second paper seems to have been published by chance before the first paper, and there- 
fore Mr. Oberholser maintains that S. pinus must be taken as the type of the genus Vermivora. Thus 
is plain fact perverted and the careful work of an ornithologist defeated in order to save the countenance 
of an absurd priority rule-of-thumb. If the genus Vermivora be accepted with Mr. Oberholser’s connota- 
tion, it surely cannot be ascribed to Swainson, but rather to Swainson’s editors! If Codes of Nomen- 
clature make no provision for a peculiar case like this, so much the worse for the Codes. 
