ON THE BEAN-GEESE. 951 



but from the writings of several authors." It seems hardly necessary 

 to point out that these authors were all mistaken. This accumulation of 

 evidence proves nothing but that these authors were not competent to 

 identify their bean-geese. Mr. Alpheraky would have us believe 

 that these authors had critically discussed the question and come to the 

 deliberate conviction that' their geese with yellow bills were A. serriros- 

 tris in spite of what Swinhoe had written. Nothing of the sort. Many 

 of these authors called their birds A. segetum, as Mr. Alpheraky himself 

 confesses. Others adopted the name of A. serrirostris from perhaps 

 some hazy notion that there was a goose of that name in Eastern Asia. 

 It is ridiculous to contend that these authors have proved anything, 

 one way or the other. 



I do not know to what it is due, but it is a fact that A. serrirostris 

 has been lost sight of for many years. I have failed to find any 

 writer, except Swinhoe, who has mentioned the occurrence of a pink- 

 billed bean-goose in Eastern Asia. I have quoted a note written by 

 Mr. Styan relating to this species, but he makes no mention of 

 the colour of the bill, and the only reason I have for knowing that he 

 wrote about this particular goose was that he sent a specimen to the 

 British Museum which agrees in all respects with Swinhoe's type. 



Mr. Alpheraky states that he received three specimens of a bean- 

 goose from the Anadyr in Eastern Siberia, on the labels of two of 

 which it was recorded that the bills in life were flesh-coloured. This 

 colour, we may take it, agrees with the pinkish-red described by 

 Swinhoe. Here at once were specimens which might reasonably be 

 indentified with A. serrirostris, and Mr. Alpheraky might have con- 

 gratulated himself on having rediscovered the species in its summer 

 quarters. So far from doing so, he tells us that these geese puzzled 

 him ; he thought them over night and day and did not know what to 

 do with them. At last, with the greatest reluctance, he put them down 

 as A. serrirostris, not, however, as the plain genuine species described 

 by Swinhoe but as aberrant or dimorphic examples of Mr. Alpheraky's 

 A. serrirostris with the yellow bill. 



The simple fact which has caused Mr. Alpheraky to make such a 

 disastrous blunder about this species is that, when writing his book, 

 he was in complete ignorance of what Swinhoe had written. He over- 

 looked Swinhoe's description, and, as I have already shewn, there 

 was no other writer who could furnish him with a hint that there 



