° 1915 J Phillips, Variation in English Sparrows. 57 



England birds than for older ones, 13.18 as against 12.64. I think 

 this result must be accidental, as I have found no specimens with 

 bills as large as 13 mm. It is not necessary to say, perhaps, that 

 observers should be careful in comparing their own measurements 

 with those of others, for meteods vary a great deal. 



It is not my intention to go into the dispersal of the sparrow in 

 America. The map which I constructed from replies to my postal 

 cards showed that the bird was present in all county seats through- 

 out the entire west which replied to my query, except a few places 

 in northern Idaho, northwestern and northeastern Oregon, north- 

 western California, and some other scattered localities mostly in 

 Nevada and Arizona. The literature teems with notices of the 

 arrival of the English Sparrow at different places through the west, 

 and a very fair map of its advance during the past twenty years 

 could be constructed from this source. I find two notices which 

 require special mention. In the 'Ottawa Naturalist' for May,. 

 1909, Criddle expresses the opinion that sparrows of eastern 

 Canada migrate in part, and that these migrants breed later than 

 the local birds. 



Wood (Wilson Bull., XXIII, p. 103) noted at Charity Isle, Lake 

 Huron, Oct. 8, 1910, a flock of several hundred P. domesticus, and 

 another flock seen a few days before. He states that the bird does 

 not breed there. Is it possible that the new environment of the 

 English Sparrow will bring about migratory tendencies? One 

 would not be inclined to attach much importance to isolated flights 

 of sparrows like the above, for they may be due to purely local 

 conditions. 



P. domesticus was also introduced about 1885 at Ivigut, Green- 

 land, but the colony was said to be diminishing (Auk, 1889, p. 297) . 

 It is present also in Bermuda, Cuba and at Nassau. Specimens 

 from these places and also from the desert towns of southern Cali- 

 fornia would be most interesting for comparison, but I have not so 

 far been able to obtain any. 



Bumpus has given us two papers on variation in the English 

 Sparrow which should be mentioned, because the second of these, 

 'The Elimination of the Unfit as Illustrated by the Introduced 

 Sparrow,' (Biol, lectures, 1898) has been quoted as an instance of 

 natural selection in active operation. Bumpus' paper is of great 



