350 Recent Literature. [ox. 



taken it there, but it is much rarer than the gray- I have taken both 

 phases in New Hampshire and Vermont, but found the red the commoner 

 in the White Mountains, and the gray the commoner in Vermont. In the 

 vicinity of New Haven the gray phase outnumbers the red by about two 

 to one, that is, so tar as my experience goes, and T have about 50 speci- 

 mens brought to me each year to be stuffed." Further comment on this 

 part of the subject is unnecessary. The foregoing sufficiently shows the 

 untrustworthy character of the author's generalizations respecting areas of 

 "exclusively grav" birds 



His methods are further illustrated in his tables showing the color of the 

 young in relation to the color of their parents. From these tables he 

 says, "It will be readily seen that red birds breed either all red, all gray, 

 or both ; that reds and grays breed either all red, all gray, or both ; while 

 grav birds, as previously stated, invariably breed true," 1 or always produce 

 gray birds. This last statement is not improbable, perhaps, but 'highly 

 important if true.' So we naturally enquire as to the evidence, and find it 

 based on apparently six observations. Turning to the next table, of 'Young 

 produced by Red Parents,' out of 19 cases we find red birds produced "all 

 gray" young in two instances, "all red" in eight cases, and mixed progeny 

 in nine cases. In the third table of 'Young of Gray and Red Parents." 

 in 12 cases three gave all gray young, four all red, and five mixed broods. 

 On this evidence the author claims that "'the grays breed true even in a 

 region where red is the predominating color, and-where the individuals in 

 question may themselves be the offspring of red -parents" and that "gray 

 birds never produce red." On this basis it is claimed that the gray birds 

 are "the ancestral stock, and that the producing of gray birds by red parents 

 is a tendency to revert to ancestral characters"; that the red bird is being 

 gradually evolved as a subspecies from the gray bird, and will in time have 

 a distinct and exclusive habitat of its own. While these facts may point 

 to his conclusions, they seem hardly to satisfactorily establish the assump- 

 tion that "grav birds never produce red." 



The "four distinct causes" operating to produce all this are : (1) Humid- 

 ity ; (2) Temperature ; (3) Acquired characters ; (4) Forest areas. Curiously 

 enough, he seeks to correlate the distribution of gray birds with regions of 

 greatest humidity, forgetting apparently that over all the more arid parts 

 of the continent all the birds of the Megascops asio group are gray ! 

 Again, curiously, he considers the red phase the light-colored type and the 

 gray phase the dark-colored form. Yet with all this he has to confess that 

 the distribution of the several color phases, even as he gives it, fails to 

 conform to the distribution of humidity, or even to the pine forest areas, 

 with which he thinks the habitat of the gray phase ought to agree. 



In treating of the influence of temperature he singularly misquotes 

 Verrill and Allen as stating that temperature is the "most potent of all 

 influences in the distribution of color," a statement they not only never 

 made, but in all probability never dreamed of making. If Mr. Hasbrouck 

 will make the slight change of substituting the word species for the word 



