428 General Notes. LJuly 



the, meaning " pertaining to a willow tree." A parallel is afforded in the 

 word legionarius, originally an adjective but which came to be used as a 

 noun — a legionary, that is, a soldier of a legion. A great number of similar 

 nominatives are listed by Professor Merrill in a special paper of his (Univ. 

 Calif. Publ. Class. Phil., vol. 2, 1910, pp. 57-65). 



It is true that Professor Merrill also says that the combination Guiraca 

 carulea salicarius is in poor taste as regards its " Latinity "; that is, the 

 Latins would not have written it that way. This consideration is, of 

 course, immaterial in nomenclatural questions, which questions are now 

 settled by arbitrarily formulated rules, one of which prescribed retention of 

 words of this category unchanged in construction from the form in which 

 they were first proposed. 



As originally proposed, the word salicarius was a noun, and it must 

 retain its own gender, masculine, irrespective of the genus name with which 

 it is associated; it is, in truth, a " substantive in the nominative in apposi- 

 tion with the generic name." It would thus appear that Guiraca coerulea 

 salicarius is, from the nomenclatural standpoint, a perfectly tenable com- 

 bination for the California Blue Grosbeak, and must be kept inviolate. — 

 J. GBnsrNELL, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, Berkeley, California. 



Editions of Baird, Cassin and Lawrence's ' Birds of North Amer- 

 ica.' — This well known work appeared first in 1858 as Volume IX of the 

 ' Pacific Railroad Surveys ' and constitutes a complete summary of the 

 ornithology of the various expeditions as well as of the Mexican Boundary 

 Survey. The separate report on the ornithology of the last as well as of 

 several of the Pacific Railroad expeditions, did not appear until a year or 

 two after Volume IX, but their contents are included in it. While no 

 plates accompanied Volume IX there were thirty-three colored plates pub- 

 lished along with the reports of the various surveys and twenty-five with 

 the Mexican Boundary report. 



In 1860 Volume IX appeared under a new title, ' The Birds of North 

 America ' with the imprint, Philadelphia, J. B. Lippincott & Co. The 

 text is exactly the same from p. xvii of the introductory portion to the end 

 of the volume and apparently printed from the same plates as the original. 

 The four pages of " Preface " are reprinted in three pages, apparently 

 without change of wording but in smaller type, the " Contents " are re- 

 printed and slightly altered, and a page of " Advertisement " is added as 

 well as a different title page. 



An atlas of one hundred colored plates accompanied this work. There 

 is a title page identical with that of the text except for the substitution of 

 " Plates " for " Text "; pages i — ii contain a preface; pp. iii-viii, " Expla- 

 nation of Plates"; and ix-xi "Systematic List of Illustrations." 



Of the thirty-three plates of the various survey volumes, thirty-one 

 appear in this atlas, nearly all of them being retouched and some of them 

 redrawn but all these closely resembling the originals, names have been 



