85 [Vol. xix. 



Gold Coast and Togo, but the pileum is slightly more 

 olive, the back darker and more rufescent, the tail 

 browner, the upper wing-coverts and edges of the remiges 

 less rufous, shading into olive, and the undersurface 

 somewhat brighter. '^'^Iris reddish-brown; bill dark horn- 

 grey, nearly black ; lower mandible slate-blue; feet slate- 

 blue." Wing 77'5 mm. 



Hah. Southern Nigeria. 



Type in the Tring Museum : ^ , No. 400. Ogata, in the 

 district inhabited by the Ibo Tribe, 19. xi. 1901 : W. J. 

 Ansorge coll. 



Mr. C. B. TicEHURST exhibited a specimen of the Sociable 

 Plover [Vanellus gregarius (Pallas)], and made the following 

 remarks : — 



" The bird, a female in its first breeding-plumage, was shot 

 from a flock of six in Romney Marsh, Kent, on the 3rd of 

 May, 1907, by a shepherd, who gave it to a farmer. The 

 latter sent it to Mr. Bristow, taxidermist, St. Leonards, to 

 be mounted, and I saw it in the flesh in his shop on the 

 6th of May. It was then fairly fresh : both wings had been 

 broken by the shot. This is the third British example. 

 [Cf. Saunders, lUust. Man. Brit. Birds, p. 553, 2nd ed. 

 (1899) : id.. Bull. B. O. C. x. no. Ixvi. p. xv (1899).] 



Mr. TicEHURST also made some remarks on a disease 

 prevalent among Wood-Pigeons at the present time : — 



^^Thisdisease attacks the Wood-Pigeon {Columbapalumbus) , 

 in an epidemic form, during those years in which acorns are 

 abundant, wlien vast numbers of these birds congregate 

 together in England. Acorns have been said, but without 

 the slightest evidence, to be the cause of the disease; but 

 they are only so indirectly, in that they attract immense 

 flocks of Pigeons. The true cause is the Bacillus diphtheria 

 columbarum, isolated by Loflfler in 1884 from the pseudo- 

 diphtheritic membrane of Wood- Pigeons which had died of 

 this infectious disease. That the disease is transmitted from 

 one Wood-Pigeon to another, either directly or indirectly, 



