1909 ] Brewster, Barrow's Golden-eye in Massachusetts. 163 



past, it would follow, as a matter of course, that the interesting 

 approaches to the former species shown by certain aberrant speci- 

 mens of the latter afford evidence that "steps" shorter and less 

 decisive than that (or those) which produced islandica have been 

 and continue to be, made by americana, in the same general direc- 

 tion. 



Thus far, indeed, the so-called laws of mutation might be made to 

 fit well with the facts and conditions of the case which we are con- 

 sidering. But if I understand these laws correctly they would fail 

 to explain why the representatives of americana which approach 

 islandica at all closely are invariably females. Nor do I know of 

 any other theory which is not similarly disappointing in this respect. 



In their 'Birds of Massachusetts' Messrs. Howe and Allen men- 

 tion (on page 55) a male Barrow's Golden-eye "labeled January 

 27, 1879, in the mounted collection of the Boston Society of Natural 

 History, which appears unrecorded" and which is supposed to have 

 been taken at Ipswich. There would seem to be little or no doubt 

 that this specimen is the same as that referred to briefly in one of 

 my note books under date of "January 27, 1869" as "an adult 

 cT shot at Ipswich, Mass. by E. C. Greenwood. Purchased of him 

 by Dr. Brewer for B. S. N. H." If I am right in so thinking, the 

 record is open to grave suspicion if, indeed, it be not quite valueless, 

 for although Greenwood is not known to have resorted to dishonest 

 practises of any kind during the earlier years of his career as a pro- 

 fessional collector, he was convicted in 1884 of having supplied 

 false data with a number of mounted birds which he had just sold 

 to the curator of a certain museum in eastern Massachusetts. 1 



Mr. Job has reported 2 that "a fine male" Barrow's Golden-eye 

 sent to a Mr. Wood "to be mounted, in the autumn of (about) 1885," 

 was shot in Plymouth. Dr. Townsend 3 considers it "probable that 

 a beautiful male in the collection of the Lawrence Natural History 

 Society," said to have been "shot near Lynn, about 1877," is one 

 and the same bird with that referred to by the late Dr. J. A. 

 Jeffries in a manuscript "note written in March, 1878," as "shot off 



1 See Brewster, Auk I, No. 3, July, 1884, pp. 295-297. 



2 H. K. Job, Auk, XIII, No. 3, July, 1896, p. 202. 



3 C. W. Townsend. Birds of Essex County, Mass. Memoirs Nutt. Orn. Club, III, 

 1905, p. 139. 



