260 Recent Literature. [April 



for years made a special study of the Broad-wing and his accounts of its 

 plumages, molt, flight, food, voice, action and disposition, both wild and in 

 captivity, migration, mating, nidification, etc., form a valuable contribu- 

 tion to ornithological literature. The numerous quotations appended from 

 the publications and manuscripts of others are of rather unequal value and 

 trustworthiness. 



In the treatment of the literature the desire to include mention of every 

 scrap of published information regardless of its value has led to the accumu- 

 lation of a mass of detailed data and titles that is bewildering in its extent 

 and could have been reduced into well digested summaries which would 

 have been of far more benefit to the reader. The lengthy bibliography too, 

 gives scarcely a clue to the contents of the papers and fails to distinguish 

 important titles from those containing mere casual mention of the subject 

 of the monograph. A shorter list of the really valuable papers with a line 

 or two of comment would have been of far greater service. These matters, 

 however, in no way detract from the value of the main text. 



A new race Buteo platypterus cubanensis from Cuba is described, but in 

 such an obscure manner as readily to escape notice and with no designa- 

 tion of a type specimen. It is just such loose methods as this which have 

 caused names to be overlooked and have led later to necessary changes in 

 nomenclature and unfortunate complications. 



A number of excellent halftones mainly from photographs by Mr. 

 Alfred C. Redfield illustrate this valuable paper. — W. S. 



Bent on Birds of the Aleutian Islands. — Mr. Arthur C. Bent 

 accompanied by Messrs. Rollo H. Beck, Alexander Wetmore and Fred B. 

 McKechnie spent the last three weeks of June, 1911, in a hurried survey of 

 the islands of the Aleutian chain. Mr. Wetmore represented the Bio- 

 logical Sm-vey of the U. S. Department of Agriculture and the expedition 

 had in mind the securing of data for Mr. Bent's continuation of the Life 

 Histories of North American Birds to be published by the Smithsonian 

 Institution. The party travelled, through the courtesy of the Treasury 

 Department, on the revenue cutter ' Tahoma ' and cruised the entire length 

 of the chain, landing on Atka, Kiska, Attu, Tanaga and Adak and the 

 western end of Unalaska. The stops were necessarily very short, as the 

 ' Tahoma ' was due at Unalaska, July 1, and exploration was limited to the 

 immediate vicinity of the harbors. 



Mr. Bent's first publication i dealing with the results of the trip was a 

 description of a new race of Ptarmigan, Lagopus rupestris sanfordi, from 

 Tanaga. On each one of the more remote islands a peculiar form seems to 

 have been differentiated. This one is said to resemble L. r. chamberlaini 

 and L. r. atkhensis from Adak and Atka Islands to the eastward, but is 

 lighter than either. 



' A New Subspecies of Ptarmigan from the Aleutian Island. By A. C. Bent. 

 Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, Vol. 56, No. 30. pp. 1-2. Jan. 6, 1912. 



