OF NORTH-EASTERN CACHAR. 41 



Bill, dark horny brown on upper mandible, and tip of lower 

 mandible ; ceral portion, and sides of upper mandible and greater 

 part of lower mandible, fleshy yellow; bare orbital space yellow- 

 ish ; irides, yellow ; legs and feet, plumbeous horny. The males 

 generally have two spurs on each leg, sometimes three, some- 

 times three on one leg and two on the other. The spurs are not 

 very long, rarely exceeding 0*5, often much shorter. In younger 

 birds they are sharp and slender, but in very old birds they 

 appear to become massive and blunt. 



The chin and throat are white ; the whole of the top and 

 back of the head are clad with fine disunited-webbed feathers, 

 which, on the forehead and crown, especially the former, 

 are elongated and erected into a brush-like crest, moi'e or 

 less recurved to the front. In color these feathers are grey brown, 

 very finely barred with greyish white. The nape and back of the 

 neck are similar, but browner and less finely barred ; the breast 

 and sides of the neck are hair brown, margined at the tip with 

 a row of brownish white spots, so closely set as to form almost 

 a continuous line. The rest of the feathers are closely barred 

 with similar lines of spots following the same curve as the 

 tip of the feathers ; abdomen and vent very similar, but with 

 the spots less regularly gathered iuto bars ; back, wings, ex- 

 cept primaries, scapulars, interscapulary region, rump and upper 

 and lower tail-coverts and tail, brown, varying slightly in tint 

 in different specimens, but being normally, what I should call 

 a dull hair brown, profusely spotted or speckled with white or 

 brownish white spots, having, specially on the upper tail-coverts 

 and rump, a tendency to be gathered more densely about the 

 tips of the feathers so as to form the semblance of a terminal 

 bar there ; the spots are largest and densest on the rump and 

 lesser tail-coverts, smallest on the wings. The scapulars, the 

 wing-coverts, tertiaries, and interscapular^ region are all 

 tipped with white, inside which is a more or less round eye, 

 consisting of a narrow dark ring enclosing a metallic patch, 

 purple in most lights, but in some lights green, changing to 

 purple towards the tip of the feathers ; these spots are largest 

 on the tertiaries where they may be 0*6 in diameter and 

 smallest on the lesser wing-coverts, and some of the inter- 

 scapulars, when they do not exceed 0*25. Sometimes, besides the 

 the white tipping there are traces of a white band encircling 

 the dark one. The tail (which when perfect has at least 20 fea- 

 thers and is very much rounded, the external feather being some 

 eight inches shorter than the central one) has on each feather 

 at a certain distance from the tip, say two inches in the central 

 feathers, and 1*25 in the exterior ones, a pair of twin oval 

 metallic spots, one on each web, surrounded by a dusky black 



