OCTODLR 0, 1<;05.J 



SCIENCE. 



433 



known that neither was accustomed to pre- 

 serve, or even to collect, many specimens. 

 Lawrence lived in New York City, and doubt- 

 less made frequent excursions into the ad- 

 joining country, but business exactions per- 

 mitted little real field work comparable to that 

 of present-day collectors and observers. In 

 fact, his collection shows that he collected very 

 few birds himself, but acquired them by pur- 

 chase. Nuttall was a botanist and, although 

 intensely interested in birds, if he ever col- 

 lected many birds in the vicinity of his Cam- 

 bridge home, the fact remains unrecorded. 

 That his field work there in ornithology is to 

 be compared with that of any one of the 

 many enthusiastic collectors that have gleaned 

 the region year after year for the last three 

 decades is not to be even suggested. In any 

 case, he worked, as already shown, practically 

 outside of the range of these forms, since only 

 two specimens have yet been obtained from 

 eastern Massachusetts. Coues and Prentiss 

 did their field work hundreds of miles distant 

 from the principal range of these forms, and 

 their collecting was casual and intermittent, in 

 comparison with that of the numerous recent 

 collectors in the Washington vicinage. Baird's 

 field work, restricted to his early days, was 

 also outside of the region here in question. 

 Finally, the rapid increase in the number of 

 these curious birds taken or observed during 

 the last ten or fifteen years certainly has not 

 more than kept pace with the greatly increased 

 number of collectors of an expert class un- 

 known ' in the early part of the last century.' 

 There are now, within the area favored by 

 these interesting birds, hundreds of private 

 collections, each numbering more specimens 

 of birds, nests and eggs, than all that had been 

 collected in New England, New York and New 

 Jersey prior to the middle of the last century. 

 While there are now hundreds of persistent 

 collectors within this prescribed area, one 

 could probably count on the fingers of the two 

 hands all those who have taken or observed in 

 life any representatives of the two birds here 

 in question. If Mr. Scott, who has done an 

 exceptionally large amount of collecting in 

 New Jersey and New England, has ever taken 

 a specimen of either of these forms he seems 



to have neglected to record the fact of such an 

 interesting capture. Evidently, then, the 

 facts in the case fail to support the supposed 

 rapid increase in the numbers of the birds in 

 question alleged by our author to be so evident. 



The ornithologists who are most familiar 

 with these birds, through the examination of 

 specimens and in life, have proposed or sup- 

 ported the theory of hybridity between H. 

 chrysoptera and H. pinus as accounting in a 

 fairly satisfactory manner for the birds, with 

 their endless variants, known as H. leuco- 

 hronchialis and H. lawrencei. But this does 

 not seem to satisfy Mr. Scott, who says : " Nor 

 does it seem that the theory of hybridity is 

 supported when we consider the vast number 

 of known specimens already in collections and 

 the fact that it is possible to observe living 

 specimens , . . each year." He further 

 says : " . . . for, though hybrids do occur 

 among wild birds, they can be considered at 

 best as only casual, and the infertility of 

 hybrids, especially among the higher animals, 

 is too well known to need further comment 

 here " ! The case of Colaptes cafer and C. 

 auratus must have, at this moment, escaped 

 Mr. Scott's recollection, between which two 

 species, for a thousand miles, north and south, 

 along the line where their ranges meet, 

 hybrids of all degrees, with every possible 

 combination of the characters of these two 

 strikingly different looking species are found 

 almost to the exclusion of birds of pure blood 

 of either species. The area of hybridity in 

 this case occupies a belt hundreds of miles in 

 width, the prevalence of birds presenting more 

 or less traces of mixed blood gradually fading 

 out both to the eastward and to the westward. 



Mr. Scott makes only passing allusion to 

 Dr. Bishop's important paper on this subject 

 in a recent number of The Auk (XXII., 

 January, 1905, pp. 21-24), and none to his 

 conclusions, which are that H. leucohronchialis 

 ' is merely a leuchroic phase of H. pinus, 

 which, from its appearing frequently only 

 within a very limited area, may in time be- 

 come a species; and that H. lawrencei is a 

 hybrid between II. chrysoptera and H. pinus.' 



Near the end of Mr. Scott's paper, he quotes 

 at considerable length from a paper recently 



