1SS4.I Recent Lilrratnre. 181 



it. Hut a lew da\.s a<4'() I was much pleased to receive by luail 

 the specimen now described, and a^reealily surprised to lind it an 

 undetermined species. 



He says: "Since I last wrote you, I have been able to procin"e 

 four H\e specimens of the Dove, called 'Pea Dove' in my list ; 

 one of them died a day or two ago, and I send von the skin. 

 which will serve to identify the bird." 



0\\ the label is "Pea Dove, 9 , Sp. .'' Caught alive at Fontenoy , 

 St. Georges, Grenada, 16 Feb., 1884. Iris pale buftV 



RECENT LITERATURE. 



Stejneger on the American Turdidae.* — The so-called -tamilv" Turdidae 

 is here taken in nearly its usually accepted sense, except that the Mimir 

 nse, so frequently embraced within it, are excluded, leaving the group as 

 here treated nearly equivalent to the Turdinee of Mr. Seebohm's late mono- 

 graph of the family. t Dr. Stejneger begins his memoir by sharply criti- 

 cizing Mr. Seebohm's generic groups among the 'Turdinse,' the construc- 

 tion, of which he considers "very radical and opposed to commonly accept- 

 ed views"; and states that his own paper "may be regarded as a reaction 

 provoked by the arrangement proposed in the above mentioned work." 

 Dr. Stejneger believes that the test "of color or pattern of color as the 

 only character which indicates near relationship," as applied by Mr. 

 Seebohm, is arbitrary and leads to inconsistent results; and he devotes 

 several pages to 'showing up' some of these inconsistencies, and in 

 pointing out that structural characters are much sounder indices of re- 

 lationship. He believes that Professor Baird's arrangement of the Ameri- 

 can Thrushes, in his "Review of American birds,' though presented 'six- 

 teen to eighteen years ago,' 'is still the best treatment of the subject 

 €xtant.' He modifies this arrangement, however, by throwing out the 

 Mocking Thrushes, and adding the so-called 'family' Saxicolidae. In this 

 he is in accord with the views of several recent writers on the subject. 

 The family Turdidae, as thus restricted, he divides into two sub-families. 

 viz., Turdinae (sub-divided into the groups Sialies, Saxicoleae, Turdese, 

 Luscinieae, and Meruleae), and Myadestinae (sub-divided into Platvcichleae 

 and MyadesteEe). The group Sialieje includes two genera, — Ridgi.va\'ia 

 (gen. nov., type Turdns pinicola Scl.) and Sialia. The group Saxicoleje 



* Remarks on the Systematic Arrangement of the American Turdidae. By Leon- 

 hard Stejneger. Proc. U. S. Nat. Mus., 18S2, pp. 449-483, with numerous cuts. Feb. 

 13, 1883. 



t Catalogue of Birds in the British Museum, Vol. V, 1881. (See review of this 

 work in Bull. Nutt. Orn. Club, VIII, pp. 99-104.) 



