1889.] ON THE INTESTINAL CONVOLUTIONS IN BIRDS. 303 
the ocelli, a black spot on each side of the frontal ocellus, a black 
stripe before it, and a short stripe bordering the inner orbits; the 
upper mouth-parts are also almost entirely black. ‘Thorax buff, 
transversely striated, with a broad green stripe on each side of the 
dorsal carina, and a narrower bronzed shoulder-stripe, showing green 
in certain lights, beneath. Legs buff, clothed with long fine black 
bristles; femora with a black line beneath; tarsi black. Abdomen 
buff, bronzed above, except at the sutures. Wings hyaline, slightly 
clouded at the tips; fore wings with 14 and hind wings with 15 
postnodal cross-nervures ; pterostigma large, covering 3 or 33 cells. 
Hab. Sarawak, Borneo ( Wallace). 
Appears to be allied to L. viridula, Ramb., but much larger. 
4. On the Taxonomic Value of the Intestinal Convolutions 
in Birds. By Hans Gavow, Ph.D., M.A., Strickland 
Curator and Lecturer on the Advanced Morphology of 
Vertebrata in the University of Cambridge. 
[Received May 1, 1889.] 
(Plate XXXII.) 
© In 1879 I published, in the ‘ Jenaische Zeitschrift’ *, two lengthy 
articles on the digestive system of birds, and I laid particular stress 
upon the convolutions of the small intestine, 7. e. upon the mode in 
which this part of the alimentary canal is stowed away in the 
abdominal cavity. 
Accounts of these convolutious are exceedingly meagre, and 
this is all the more surprising as Cuvier long ago drew attention to 
the remarkable diversity which prevails in the arrangement of the 
intestinal folds. However, there are only a few dozen birds de- 
scribed in his ‘ Legons d’Anatomie Comparée,’ no generalizing con- 
clusions are drawn, and with few exceptions (MacGillivray) this 
part of descriptive ornithotomy has slept ever since. 
My former researches were based upon the examination of about 
200 different birds, an ample material, but not large enough to warrant 
all the taxonomic conclusions which I then drew, especially as these 
were marred by the fetters of certain antiquated traditions, now 
fortunately superseded. 
In preparing the account of the alimentary canal of birds for 
Bronn’s ‘ Klassen und Ordnungen des Thierreichs,’ I have recently 
had occasion once more to take up this question on a much broader 
basis and in a more elaborate way. 1 therefore take the oppor- 
tunity to lay before the Society a condensed account of the taxonomic 
value of the intestinai convolutions in birds. 
? “Versuch einer vergleichenden Anatomie des Verdauungssystemes der 
Voegel,” Jenaische Zeitschrift fiir Naturwissenschaft, xiii. pp. 92-117, 339-403, 
pls, iv.-xi. & xvi. 
