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Dr. A. G. Butler,



back, ashy sides to head, including orbital ellipse ; paler and more

restricted throat-area, owing to the duller and more diffused orange

breast-belt ; margins of primaries buttercup-yellow and broader to¬

wards the tips; wing speculum apparently of a brighter crimson ;

belt crossing secondaries behind speculum buttercup-yellow and

rather narrow : white terminal fringe to upper tail-coverts well

defined ; feet ochreous. Its song is shorter and less varied.


Not possessing the volume of the Museum Catalogue in which

Liothrix appears, and believing that no species but L. lutea was

known to science, I wrote to Mr. Charles Chubb at the Museum and

asked him whether he knew of any record of a species or subspecies

nearly related to L. lutea. In reply he said he knew of no new

species of Liothrix having been described, but he enclosed a note

published by the late Henry Seebohm in the Proceedings of the

Zoological Society, in which that author argues that the Himalayan

bird is distinct from the Chinese one, which is typical of L. lutea,

Scopoli (the original specimen having come from Nankin), and

should take the name L. calipyga (Hodgson, Indian Review, 1838,


p. 88).


Of the Chinese bird Seebohm says two examples procured by

Herr Baun at Puching differ from Himalayan examples in having ‘‘a

much more forked tail, the outer feathers being '35 inch longer than

the central feathers, instead of only '15 inch. The red patch on the

wing is almost as rich, whilst the red on the outer webs of the two

innermost primaries is almost as pale as in Liothrix argentauris.

The tertials of the Chinese species are slaty green, like those of

Liothrix. argentauris, instead of being rufous green, and the general

colour of the upper parts is of a bluer green than in Liothrix

calipyga."


Although some of the above-mentioned characters might pos¬

sibly not be perfectly reliable, in a species which undoubtedly be¬

comes more richly coloured as age advances ; it is highly probable

that the majority of them have a local value. My bird, though it

seems more nearly to approach the description of the Chinese than

the Indian bird, seems to be in some respects rather different from

either of them ; and might prove, if we knew its habitat, to repre¬

sent another race of the species. It is probable that Chinese birds



