Western Persia and Armenia. Tha) 
Colonel Bailward, who arranged that Mr. Woosnam 
should go with him in order to procure birds and 
mammals, has most generously presented the collection to the 
British Museum. The authorities of the Museum have very 
kindly allowed me to work out the birds, a task which has 
been a source of great pleasure and interest to me, owing more 
particularly to the fact that I had already made collections in 
part of the same country (cf. ‘Ibis,’ 1903, pp. 501 et seqq.). 
The series of birds obtained by Mr. Woosnam comprises 
about 350 specimens of some 165 forms. It contains practi- 
cally no novelties, and, so far as species go, adds little to 
previous records; but it has two features of considerable 
merit. The one, interesting chiefly to the systematist, is 
that it has provided material for a discussion of many of the 
forms described during the last year or two by Baron Loudon 
and M. Sarudny in the ‘Ornithologische Monatsberichte’ 
and the ‘ Ornithologisches Jahrbuch’; the other, of wider 
interest, is that the collection in itself forms an admirable 
object-lesson of the restricted distribution of certain geo- 
graphical forms. 
A glance at the accompanying sketch-map of the route 
taken by the Expedition (Plate II.) will shew that the 
collection was made in a comparatively narrow strip of 
country running for a very considerable distance from the 
south-east to the north-west. Except for the first portion of 
the route, which was on the coastal plain, the journey was 
through a mountainous district, where the altitudes through- 
out averaged much the same, viz., from about 5000 ft. 
to 10,000 ft. The character of the country all along the 
eastern side of the range is, as Col. Bailward tells me, much 
the same, yet about lat. 35° N. there seems to be a dividing- 
line between the avifauna of the north and that of the 
south. In the mountains north of lat. 35°, Mr. Woosnam 
obtained a number of birds which, so far as I know, are 
not found in the mountains to the south of that degree ; 
while in some cases the forms from the northern portion of 
the route are represented in the southern portion by others 
nearly allied to them. 
