370 Capt. Beavan on various Indian Birds. 



tinct species of much more considerable size ? This supposition 

 is probable enough ; but it would be perhaps premature to 

 establish at the present time a new specific form ; and before in- 

 scribing it in our systematic catalogues, it seems to me more 

 prudent to wait till new researches shall have produced some 

 parts of the skeleton belonging to adult birds, which will inform 

 us more exactly as to the proportions of our British Pelican. 



We know at what geological epoch most of the mammals 

 whose remains are found buried in the drift have appeared ; we 

 know also the epoch at which some of them have ceased to exist. 

 With birds it is unfortunately not thus ; the materials of study 

 we have at our disposal are not yet sufficient to let us reconstruct 

 the entire history of the species of which we can determine the 

 history during the " quaternary " period. Has the ornitho- 

 logical population of this epoch, contemporary with the first ages 

 of man, having been submitted to the same influences as the 

 mammalian fauna, undergone analogous modifications ? The 

 little we at present know of it inclines to make us think so ; for 

 we know that at the epoch when the caves were filled up many of 

 our birds already existed in large numbers. Othei's, such as 

 the Snowy Owl [Nyctea nivea) and the Willow- Grouse {Tetrao 

 albus), have gradually retired towards the north ; others, again, 

 have at last disappeared, as proved by the remains of the large 

 Crane discovered in the caves of the Dordogne*. The remains 

 collected in the peat-bogs of Cambridgeshire seem to indicate 

 facts of the same order ; for by the side of the Swan, the Duck, 

 the Grebe, the Bittern, and the Coot we find a Pelican of gi- 

 gantic stature, which seems to belong to a species different from 

 those which represent this genus in our actual fauna, and has 

 lived in England along with the Great Irish Elk, the Urus, and 

 perhaps even with the Tichorhine Rhinoceros. 



XXXI. — Notes on Various Indian Birds. 



By R. C. Beavan, Bengal Stafi* Corps, C.M.Z.S. 



[Continued from p. 181.] 



772. Crocopus ph(enicopterus. Bengal Green Pigeon. 



I found this species tolerably abundant in the Maunbhoom 



* [Cf. Ibis, 1866, p. 414.— Ed.] 



