420 letters to the editor. 



My Dear Sir, 



If I permitted myself to remark your frag- 

 mentary knowledge of the Asiatic Avifauna north of the 

 Thian-Shan (or rather Tian-Shan) there was no reproach involved 

 which you need excuse. I think that when the materials for the 

 Avifauna of the country between the Ural, the Altai and 

 the Tian-Shan are almost quite unpublished, as those of 

 Karelin, or published only in Russian, as those of Eversmanu 

 and mine, an English ornithologist cannot profit much by them. 

 I only constated the fact, and nothing more. And despite all 

 this, and the hurried work, and the incomplete literary mate- 

 rials, your view on the geographic delimitation of the 

 Central Asiatic ornithological province appeared to me very 

 correct, and I delighted in the reading of your work. 



You ask now whether I will continue publishing my 

 investigations about the Avifauna of Russian Turkestan and 

 Kirghis Steppes in another language than Russian— certainly, 

 and my next work, if it be even in Russian, will contain 

 Latin diagnoses and indications of the geographical range of 

 the described species ; but I don't know when I can publish 

 it, because now I am working out the physical geography of 

 the Tian-Shan for our Geographical Society from information 

 obtained from my own travels and other sources. You have my 

 travel book in Russian; it is just translated in German, in the 

 last " Erganzungsheft zu Petermann's Geographischen Mittheil- 

 ungen ;"and my first journey to the Tian-Shan (18(54) was trans- 

 lated into English by Mr. Mitchell. You have also the general 

 part of my " vertical and horizontal distribution of the birds in 

 Russian Turkestan" in Cabanis' Journal. All this general part 

 is translated, but not having received the journal for the last 

 two years, I don't know whether the whole translation con- 

 taining a complete catalogue of the Avifauna of Russian 

 Turkestan, is already printed. I have made for this German 

 edition many additions and corrections to my original Russian 

 text; and the geographical distribution of the birds, as well 

 as the signs indicating it in the synoptic tables, are explained. 



And last year, May-December 1874, I made a new excur- 

 sion to the Oxus and Jaxartes, from whence I brought many inter- 

 esting ornithological specimens ; I promised also for Cabanis 

 Journal descriptions of my new species, but they are not ready. 

 For you I can give diagnoses in this letter — for your work 

 on the collections of Stoliczka, which I am impatient to read, 

 and therefore ready to serve you by this, though imperfectly. 



I be"-in by unpublished corrections of my Russian text, which 

 I have not at hand, from my note-book here. I wrote them 

 when comparing this text with some collections abroad, per- 

 ticularly at Berlin. 



1. Gyps nivicola — figured in my work ; much larger 

 than fulvus, 50 to 53 inches long, 9 to 10 feet in the spread 



