274 ZOOLOGICAL GARDENS. 



his General Synopsis of Birds, first described the 

 Adjutant of the British residents at Calcutta, or Argala 

 of the natives, under the name of the Gigantic Crane. 

 His knowledge of this bird was wholly derived from 

 Ives's Voyage to India, published in 1773 ; but he 

 added, as probably applicable to the same species, 

 some particulars obtained from Smeathman respecting 

 the habits of a bird seen by that traveller on the 

 western coast of Africa. On these indications Gmelin 

 founded his Ardea dubia, which Latham, feeling no 

 doubts upon the subject, very properly changed, in his 

 Index Ornithologicus, into Ardea Argala, retaining the 

 Indian designation. He had previously figured the 

 Indian bird, from a drawing in Lady Impey's Collection, 

 and given some additional particulars of its habits, in 

 the first Supplement to his Synopsis, published in 1787. 

 Mr. Marsden, in his History of Sumatra, makes 

 mention of a bird, called by the natives of that island 

 Boorong-Cambing or Boorong-Oolar, which w^as gene- 

 rally believed to be of the same species with the Adju- 

 tant t)f Bengal. Dr. Horsfield, however, in a paper 

 published in the thirteenth volume of the Linnean 

 Transactions, separates a Javanese bird, which is pro- 

 bably the same with the Sumatran, as a distinct species. 

 Subsequently M. Temminck, in his Planches Coloriees, 

 has shown that the African species differs in several 

 essential particulars from that of the Continent of India, 

 and still more remarkably from that of Java and the 

 neighbouring islands. By his figures of the three 

 species, all taken from living specimens, he has so 

 clearly determined their characters that it is scarcely 

 possible they should ever again be confounded. In 

 one point, however, he has himself given rise to a 

 different kind of confusion, that of their nomenclature. 

 They all furnish, in more or less perfection, the beau- 



