438 NOTES ON TURDUS DISSIMILIS, Blyth, 



species, which in all plumages has the flanks brown, whereas 

 in T. dissimilis they are in all plumag-es rich rusty chestnut. 



This Thrush is very rare in collections in England. I have 

 never seen more than two fully adult males, one in my own 

 collection from China, and one in the Philadelphia Museum 

 from Japan. Its history is very obscure, and its synonymy 

 much confused. Its nearest allies are T, chrysolaus, Temm., 

 T. obscurusj Gm., T. pallidus, Gm. and T. unicolor, Gould, 

 which form, with a few other species, a compact group or sub- 

 genus of Thrushes, distinguished by the following characters : — 

 The sexes are different ; the fully adult plumage of the male is 

 alike unspotted above and below ; it is not assumed until after 

 the second moult, so that immature males are frequently found 

 breeding ; and the plumage of the immature male very closely 

 resembles the plumage of the female, and is always spotted on 

 the cheeks, generally more or less distinctly so on the throat, and 

 occasionally obscurely so on the breast, but never on the flanks. 



The species under consideration was first discovered by 

 Blyth, and was for some time considered by him as the male of 

 T. unicolor, Gould.* In 1847 he described it in the Journ. As. 

 Soc, Bengal (p. 144) as Turdus dissimilis. The immature 

 male was described as adult male, and the female said to resem- 

 ble that of T. unicolor, Gould, which is not the case. 



In 1850, Bonaparte, in his Conspectus (I., p. 273), described 

 another immature male of this species as Turdus pelios, from 

 a skin in the Leyden Museum from Central Asia. Bonaparte's 

 name was, however, transferred to an Abyssinian Thrush, with 

 which it was wrongly identified by some ornithologist, whose 

 faith in the correctness of the Leyden localities was as small as 

 his power of discriminating between allied species. 



In 1863 Dr. Jerdon, in his Birds of India, (I, p. 521), added 

 a third synonym to this species by describing the immature 

 male as the female of Turdulus cardis, Temm. 



In the same year, Dr. Sclater described the immature male 

 and the female in the Ibis, (page 196), as a new species Turdus 

 Jiortulorum from Amoy in South China. 



In 1870, Cabanis described a female in the Journal fiir Orni- 

 thologie (p. 238), from the Amoor, reclaiming the name of 

 Turdus pelios, Bonap., for the species, asserting that the locality 

 of the skin in the Leyden Museum was doubtless correct, and 

 pointing out that the Abyssinian bird, with which it had been 

 wrongly identified, was Turdus icterorhynchus, Pr. Wiirt. 



* Surely Ticlcell and not Gould is the authority for this name P TicTcelVs name 

 dates from 1833, J. A. S. B., II, 569 et seq., and was unquestionably applied to 

 the very same birds as those obtained in the neighbourhood of Calcutta, which 

 Blyth later named dissimilis. Of course unicolor, Gould, ntaif be something diifer- 

 ent.— Ed., S. F, 



