No. 7.— A Collection of Birds from the Cayman Islands. 
By Outram Bancs. 
In the year 1911 the well-known collector, W. W. Brown, Jr., 
spent the spring and early summer, April to July, in the Caymans. 
He visited all three islands and made a practically complete collection 
of the resident, breeding land birds of the group. This beautiful lot 
of skins, in Brown’s inimitable make, fortunately remained intact and 
was secured for the Museum of Comparative Zodélogy. Below I give 
an annotated list of the collection which represents only the resident 
ornis of the islands, being happily free from migrants. 
In the Ibis for 1911, (ser. 9, 5, p. 137-161), Mr. P. R. Lowe published 
a list of the birds of the Cayman Islands. Lowe’s account of the ~ 
islands and his description of them is so good and complete as to leave 
nothing more to be said. He also brought up to date all bird collecting 
that had been done there. I must, however, give my opinion upon the 
sources whence the bird life peculiar to the Caymans has been derived. 
Lowe justly states that on account of the very recent origin of the 
islands no genus and no very peculiar forms occur there alone. In the 
main, this is true, but I think for the moment he had forgotten Mimo- 
cichla ravida. This bird bears no close relationship to any other 
existing species of the genus. We must, however, bear in mind that 
Jamaica at present, alone among the Greater Antilles, is without a 
species of Mimocichla. It is highly probable that a form similar to 
M. ravida once occurred there and that the Cayman bird, now itself 
on the verge of extinction, was derived from that form. 
Coereba sharpei is a species of uncertain origin. The genus Coereba 
has been in the near past, and perhaps is still, so very plastic that the 
relationships of the various forms are hard to trace. 
Dendroica vitellina (which also occurs in Swan Island) and D. 
crawfordi, quite clearly indicate an instance, rather rare among birds, 
of a migratory species establishing itself upon islands that lie on the 
line of passage and becoming differentiated there; for clearly the 
nearest relation of these two wood-warblers is the migratory North 
American Dendroica discolor. 
Three other peculiar forms were, I believe, received directly from 
