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A FEW WORDS IN REPLY TO MR. E. W. OATES' PAPER 

 ON THE SPECIES OF BEAN-GEESE. 



{Printed for Monsieur S. Alpheralcy at St. Petersburg, 8th July 1906.) 



Mr. Eugene W. Oates has, in the journal of the " Bombay Natural History 

 Society " (April 23, 1906), published a paper on the species of Bean-Geese with 

 a plate of drawings of their bills and a postscript, containing a very severe 

 criticism of my book " The Geese of Europe and Asia ". 



The Author says that I have by this work " rendered the study of these birds 

 more difficult in future ". How far Mr. Oates is right in this his opinion I shall 

 try to shew in the following lines. 



I shall speak of the species in the order Mr. Oates has placed them. 



1. Ansee akvensis, Brehm. (Bill. fig. 1). 



To begin with, Mr. Oates seems astonished at the great size of the bill as 

 represented by Mr. Frohawk on the plate which accompanies his paper. Had 

 Mr. Oates read what I have said about this Goose in my book, he would have 

 seen that considerably larger bills in this species are by no means of rare 

 occurrence. 



Mr. Oates acknowledges that this Goose is the Bean-Goose proper of Great 

 Britain, and I am glad, that in this case at least he agrees with what I have 

 said on the subject in my work, and what I knew to be the case some four or 

 five years ago. 



I well remember that I had then written to Mr. F. W. Frohawk asking him 

 to have the kindness to settle, by a careful comparison of British-killed speci- 

 mens of Bean-Geese, the conclusion I had arrived at theoretically ; that is, that 

 it could not be the Melanonyx segetum, but the much bigger Melanonyx arvensis, 

 that was the common Bean-Goose of the British Isles. 



At the same time I had sent Mr. Frohawk the details I had worked out to 

 surely discriminate between the two species. This Mr. Frohawk most oblig- 

 ingly did, and proved practically that my theoretical conclusions were correct. 



That things stood so, can easily be seen from two papers (with illustrations 

 of the bills) by Mr. Frohawk ; one in the " Field", the other in the " Zoologist ". 

 I do not think that Mr. Oates could have arrived at the same conclusion by 

 himself, since he clearly says that he has never even seen the skin of a segetum. 

 Now to decide such a question, not knowing thoroughly both these Geese, and 

 this in numbers too, is, to my belief, an absolute impossibility. 



The Author further says : " Mr. Alpheraky would have us call the species 

 the "Yellow-billed Bean-Goose", but I do not think that many persons will 

 care to follow him in this." This, at all events, is an unmerited reproach, as 

 never even had the intention of inventing a new English name for this Goose > 

 but simply adopted the one proposed for this species by Mr. Frohawk in one 

 of his above-mentioned writings. I find, however, that the name " Yellow- 

 billed Bean-Goose " is by far a better one than, for example, the one Mr. Oates 

 has found out for the next species, calling it the " European Bean-Goose," 



