DALMATIAN GOLD-CREST. 161 



prevented us from coming to any decided opinion 

 for ourselves ; but the occurrence lately of a bird 

 in a similar state of plumage on our own shores, 

 has given fresh interest to the subject, and will 

 ultimately enable us to decide whether or not our 

 suspicions were correct. Mr Gould received the 

 specimen from which his figure is taken from the 

 Baron de Feldegg of Franckfort, who shot it in 

 Dalmatia in 1829, and by dissection proved it to 

 be a male. Mr John Hancock of Newcastle, 

 whose attention to the minuter distinctions 

 between some of our most closely allied birds 

 has been attended with so much success, has sent 

 a notice to the Annals of Natural History re- 

 garding the capture of a bird on the Northumbrian 

 coast, which he considers to agree in every point 

 with Mr Gould's Dalmatian Regulus ; and as a 

 reason for considering it as a good species, he 

 states, that the covering of the nostril is not com- 

 posed of a single plumulet, as in the other known 

 Reguli. We transcribe the notice as we got it, 

 containing a minute description, and will request 

 ornithologists to attend farther to this interesting 

 addition : "I beg to send you a notice of a 

 very scarce and interesting species of Regulus, 

 which I shot on the banks near Hartley, on the 

 coast of Northumberland, on the 26th of last 

 September. It corresponds exactly with Gould's 

 It. modestus, a species so extremely rare, that he 

 considers the individual from which he described 

 as unique in the continental museums. The 

 description of my bird, which will now entitle 

 t 



