THE GAME BIRDS OF INDIA, BURMA AND CEYLON. 269 



Hume describes these eggs as being broad ovals of regular peg- 

 top shape with stout compact shells, very faintly glossed. He adds : 

 " The ground is a pale pinky stone colour of varying shades some- 

 times almost white, sometimes browner, sometimes more decidedly 

 pink, densely and boldly blotched (the blotches often longitudinal 

 in their character and radiating in curved lines from the broad 

 apex) with a rich, at times brownish, maroon, almost black in 

 some spots, browner in some eggs, redder in others, this blotching 

 being generally intermingled with very similarly shaped, sub- 

 surface looking pale grey or inky purple patches or clouds. " 



" In some eggs the markings are almost entirely confined to the 

 upper one-third of the eggs, where they are in places all but 

 confluent. In others the markings, though in such cases often 

 less densely set, extend over the entire upper half of the egg ; but 

 as a rule but few markings, and then much reduced in size, extend 

 over the lower half of the egg. " 



" The eggs, I have measured, varied from l - 66 to l - 76 in length, 

 and from 1*2 to 1-28 in breadth, but the average of 10 eggs is 

 1-71 by 1-24." 



Oates, in describing the eggs of the Solitary Snipe in the Collec- 

 tion of the British Museum, notes that " they are easily distin- 

 guished from the eggs of all other snipes in the collection by reason 



of their pinkish-buff ground colour Many of the blotches 



are streaky and make an angle with the major axis, seeming to be, 

 as it were, twisted round the egg from right to left, when the 

 specimen is viewed with the broad end uppermost. " 



The Collection contains 3 of Mandelli's eggs, so the above 

 reference to the pinkish ground colour may be considered applicable 

 to those as well as the others and agrees with Hume's own descrip- 

 tion. The other Solitary Snipe's eggs in the Collection are two 

 clutches from Ta-tran-la, Tibet, and were taken at an elevation of 

 12,000 ft. 



In my own Collection I have a clutch of four eggs from Turkistan 

 and a single egg from Innakul, the latter of which was given me 

 by the Hon'ble Walter Rothschild out of a clutch of four eggs in the 

 Tring Museum. All the eggs have the drab-yellow ground colour 

 and vandyke brown markings of ordinary snipe's eggs with no 



