368 SYLVIIDvE. 



feathers nearly half an inch longer than the outer pair. 

 Chin, throat and breast, dirty white ; helly, vent, flanks, 

 axillaries and lower wing-coverts, delicate fawn-colour ; pri- 

 maries and tail-feathers greyish-hrown heneath, the shafts of 

 the latter white : legs light brown ; toes and claws darker ; tarsi 

 with several scales in front. The second wing-quill nearly 

 as long as the third and longer than the fourth. 



In breaking up the great genus Sylvia, the Warblers of 

 aquatic habit have been generally separated from the rest, 

 and most authors in this country have used for them the 

 generic name Salicaria proposed in 1833 by Selby ; but he 

 had been anticipated in this division by F. Boie, who in 

 1822 (Isis, x. p. 552) founded a genus Calamoherpe, the 

 type of which is the species next to be described, and abso- 

 lutely congeneric with the present : the name Acrocephalus, 

 however, said to have been conferred by the elder Naumann 

 in 1819, takes precedence of both these, and is accordingly 

 here adopted*. Other subdivisions have since been estab- 

 lished, with more or less show of reason, but it is here 

 thought advisable to retain all the British aquatic Warblers 

 in one genus, as was done in former Editions of this work. 



* Calamodyta has been employed by several writers for the genus under the 

 belief that it was conferred by Bernhard Meyer (Vog. Liv- und Esthl. p. 116) 

 still earlier, in 1815. In its plural form it was certainly used by him then and 

 later for the group of aquatic Warblers, but not in a generic sense, as shewn by 

 his using Saxicolce for the Rock-Thrushes, just as he uses Calamodytce for the 

 aquatic Warblers, while he keeps the former under Turdus just as he puts the 

 latter under Sylvia, and yet adopts Bechstein's genus Saxicola for the Chats. 



