576 Letters, Extracts, Notices, ^t. 



some stuffed specimens in Madrid said to have been sent 

 from the Cordillera de Leon. I could not buy one, but 

 noted the small size, very dark general tone of plumage, and 

 the dark legs. I never myself shot a Grey Partridge iu 

 Spain, and have only seen it once or twice, in Aragon, in the 

 grassy ' praderas ' of the Pyrenees, far above all cultivation, 

 and, in one instance, in a spot where one might rather expect 

 to find Ptarmigan. I found from the natives that in Aragon 

 these birds are well known, though by no means common, 

 that they generally keep to an elevation of from 3000 to 

 6000 or 7000 feet, and are known by the name of Fresana. 

 I heard much the same story about them in Navarre, except 

 that they are there met with much lower down, and are gene- 

 rally known as Perdiz gris. In the mountains of Santander, 

 on the frontier of Asturias, in 1876, though I never saw one 

 alive or dead, I distinctly recognized the call of this bird at 

 some 4000 feet above the sea-level, and found that a few of 

 the villagers knew of their existence and called them Perdiz 

 parda." 



In the J. f. O. 1892, p. 226, Herr Reiehenow, who received 

 an example of a Partridge from La Coruna, Galicia, North- 

 western Spain, has bestowed upon the Galician bird the name 

 of Perdix hispaniensis ; but Mr. W. Ogilvie Grant, in his 

 recently-published ' Catalogue of the Game Birds in the 

 British Museum' (vol. xxii. p. 560), has treated a specimen 

 recently received from La Coruna as a mere form of Perdix 

 cinerea. Both the specimens above mentioned were obtained 

 from Dr. V. L. Seoane, of that town. Such being the scarcity 

 of material, I was glad to have placed in my hands by Lord 

 Lilford three examples of Spanish Partridges, namely a male 

 from Lugo, Galicia (Z)/-. Seoane), and two females from Pon- 

 ferrada, in Leon, on the south side of the Cantabrian range. 

 With these I visited the Natural History Museum, and there 

 Mr, Grant and I went through the entire series of Perdix 

 cinerea. What constitutes a separable species must in many 

 cases remain a matter of opinion, but if the variations observ- 

 able in the present case are considered sufiBcient, the sub- 

 divisions of species will soon rival those of Brehm. 



