Vol. xxxviii. | 46 
impossibility of being able adequately to cope with the 
very large number of specimens which accumulated, or to 
understand more than a fraction of the mass of strange 
facts and phenomena which were presented to the workers. 
Mr. Beebe mentioned the kind of work which he with his 
assistants was doing at the Station, and referred to two 
classes of birds whose life-history was practically unknown 
and into which he had been able to throw some light. In 
the case of the Toucans, birds which had been known for 
hundreds of years and of which examples of many species 
had been kept in captivity, nothing was known about their 
nesting habits in the wild state. In the limited area of 
Bartica Hstate five species occurred, and the nests of these 
had been found and the eggs and young described and 
photographed *. 
Three species of Tinamou occurred in the vicinity of 
Bartica, these belonging to two genera, Tinamus and 
Crypturus, the characters of differentiation, recognized by 
ornithologists throughout the world, being in the scales 
of the tarsus. In Tinamus the hinder part of the leg is 
very rough, the edges of the scales projecting so as to form 
a series of rugged corrugations, whereas in Crypturus the 
scales on this part of the leg were quite smooth. Ornitholo- 
gists have never questioned the reason for this difference in 
two. so nearly-allied genera, but have accepted it without 
asking “why?” Mr. Beebe, however, decided to do his best 
to solve the riddle. He noticed that the roughened scales 
in Tinamus were always very dirty, their interstices being 
often completely choked with fine mud or fibrous mould, 
whereas the legs of Crypturus were always as clean as they 
were smooth. With a half-framed theory in his mind, he 
washed off the dirt from the legs of several specimens and 
- sprinkled it on to a pot of earth which had been previously 
baked. In the course of a week or so he had obtained an 
interesting assortment of mosses and arboreal plants. 
* The small Toucan Selenidera maculirostris bred in the London 
Zoological Gardens in 1913, a young bird being hatched but dying 
before leaving the nest. This nestling was figured in the Proceedings of 
the Zoological Society, 1918, pp. 1095, 1096, special attention being 
called to the serrated heel-pads.—Ep. 
