574 Letters, Extracts, Notices, ^c. 



22. Cercomela melanura (?). — It is some consolation to see 

 a note of interrogation placed to this name. Whatever 

 the bird seen in the Wurdwao valley may have been^ it 

 may be confidently assumed that it was not Cercomela 

 melanura, which has never been obtained by anyone 

 east of the Persian Gulf, although it is a conspicuous 

 bird for its size and easily recognized. 



Lieut. Cordeaux speaks of the bird he saw as cor- 

 responding " exactly with Jerdon's description of Sir 

 A.Burne's specimen." Jerdon^s description was probably 

 taken from an Abyssinian skin ; no specimen collected by 

 Sir Alexander Bnrnes (notBurne) is known. Amongst 

 some very indifferent drawings in the collection made 

 by Sir A. Burnes was one of a Sind bird, of which Blyth 

 wrote in 1847 (J. A. S. B. xvi. p. 131) :—" Among 

 Burnes^s drawings there is a rude figure of what is 

 probably Sax. melanura, Temm." On the strength of 

 this note of Blyth^s, and without any other evidence 

 whatever^ at a time when the birds of Sind were almost 

 unknown^ Jerdon unfortunately inserted the name and 

 description of the species in the ' Birds of India.' 

 Thanks to Hume and others, the Sind fauna is now 

 particularly well explored, scarcely any part of India 

 has been more thorouglily searched, but no specimen of 

 Cercomela melanura has even been seen, much less shot. 

 I know the bird well ; I shot it repeatedly on the coast- 

 land of the Red Sea. I have spent three seasons in Sind 

 and travelled over the greater part of the province; 

 I have also travelled in Baluchistan and Persia, and I 

 certainly never met with Cercomela melanura. I do not 

 believe the bird exists in Persia, Balucliistan, or Sind, 

 and its occurrence in Kashmir is even more improbable. 



33. ^GiALiTis GEOFFROYi (?) . — In this case also a note of 

 interrogation is aj^pended, and with justice, because it 

 would be difficult, even for one who knows the species 

 well, to distinguish ^. geoffroyi from jE. mongolicus, 

 when out of shot on a sandbank in the middle of a river. 

 Adams (P. Z. S. 1858, p. 505; 1859, p. 188) identified 



