1903.] FEATHER-TRACTS IN BIRDS. 293 
Macartney. The observations of the latter were published in 1819 
(Rees’s Cyclopedia, article Feathers) :— 
Although the common feathers cover the whole body, they do not 
grow from every part of the skin; they are thickest upon the shoulders and 
loins, along the underpart of the neck and breast, and do not exist upon 
the lateral lines of the neck or breast, or about the umbilicus. This 
arrangement, and their being directed downwards and backwards, allows 
them to cover the body more neatly, and to remain unruffled during the 
motions of the bird. 
The observations of Hunter appeared first in Owen’s ‘ Catalogue 
of the College of Surgeons’ (vol. iii. pt. ii. p. 311), dated 1836 :— 
Although the feathers of birds appear to be an entire and uniform 
covering, they do not arise equally from every part of the body, but only 
from such parts of the skin as are least liable to be attected by the motion 
of the contiguous parts, such as the motion of the limbs. 
Hunter, however, seems to have done something more, and to 
have discriminated the feather-tracts, for, on the page quoted 
above, we read :— 
To these groups or thickets of feathers I shall give particular names, 
taken from their situation. 
It is, of course, only a coincidence that Hunter used the terms 
“thickets of feathers,” and that Nitzsch, in his Essay, ‘ Pterylo- 
graphie Avium, Pars prior, 1833, chose a very similar name, 
pteryle, which Prof. Newton has translated “ feather-forests.” It 
may perhaps be of service to record the fact. 
If the date of Hunter’s observations be taken at about 1785, in 
which year he built his Museum, an earlier notice of the feather- 
tracts exists by at least twenty years. This occurs in the treatise 
by Linnzus, ‘ Fundamenta Ornithologica,’ presented at Upsala by 
A. P. Beckmann, May 4, 1765 (Ameenitates Acad. vii.). Premising 
that the feathers are arranged in the form of a quincunx, the 
author proceeds :—_ 
Nuda vero cutis est (h. e. pennarum gwincwnce non perforata aut tecta) 
utrinque ad colli latera, a capite interscapulium versus, et ab axillis per 
latera pectoris ad inguina usque, atque per femora postica, remotis integu- 
mentis, videnda. 
This is as clear as language can make it. If, however, any 
doubt could exist, this would be at once removed by reference to 
the plate (see text-fig. 49, p. 294), where, in a schematic bird, the 
contour-feathers are arranged in quincunces, and there the bare 
space running from the neck to the femur is connected with that on 
the opposite side by the naked patch in the interscapular region. 
The naked spaces, as figured, would, if looked at from above, form 
a quincunx ; and the text recalls a passage in the ‘Garden of 
Cyrus,’ where Browne writes of the quincuncial arrangement in 
the “feathery plantation about birds.” Although the primary 
reference by Browne is to the papille in the feather-tracts, I suggest 
(and in this I am glad to have the support of Mr. Southwell) 
