316 BREWSTER’S WARBLER. 
the stand was written in the autograph of John Cassin, “‘J. C., 20 October, — 
1862”, and also a badly blurred legend ‘‘ Not [note?] from Bell.” An appeal to 
J. G. Bell elicited the response that he remembered shooting a peculiar Warbler 
in Rockland Co., N. Y., about the year 1832,— a Warbler something like a 
Golden-wing, but lacking, although in high plumage, the black throat of that 
species; a great many years afterward, he sold this specimen in Philadelphia 
but knew nothing of its ultimate fate. Dr. Trotter justly inferred that the Phila- 
delphia Academy specimen was in all probability the very bird shot by Bell. 
Now as Audubon was intimately associated with Bell, is it not possible that 
he had examined this example of Brewster’s Warbler? In that case, seeing that 
this bird’s characters were in part those of the Blue-wing, in part those of the 
Golden-wing, he may have inferred the interbreeding of these two birds, and so 
(rather unwarrantably, it is true) their identity. If this be not the ex- 
planation of the passage in Audubon’s letter to Bachman I have no other to 
suggest. 
When Audubon came to publish his account of the Golden-winged Warbler 
in 1839 (Ornithological Biography, 1839, 5, p. 154) he said not a word about 
its connection with the Blue-winged Warbler. 
