INTRODUCTION 



XXI 11 



Pheasants are members of the great group of gallinaceous or fowl-like birds, a 

 group which has been recognized with more or less precision since the time of Linnaeus. 

 The earlier naturalists knew them as Rasores, or scratching birds, from their universal 

 habit of digging among leaves or into the ground with their claws, and uncovering the 

 seeds and grubs and worms upon which they feed. But this was too superficial a 

 character to hold any group of birds together. Many unrelated birds, such as our 

 white-throated sparrow, could qualify as members on this criterion. 



At first thought it would seem as if there could never be any doubt as to the 

 identity of a pheasant, or even a gallinaceous bird. But, unlike such completely isolated 

 groups as penguins, owls and tinamous, the Galliformes have outliers or hangers-on 

 which in general character are linked with members of other orders. Until either 

 we unearth much more significant fossil material than has heretofore been discovered, 

 or until the embryology of scores of species has been thoroughly worked out, we 

 must regard these lines of relationship as mere hints, evanescent twigs and branches 

 connecting the foliage of living species of birds. 



Considering the group as a whole, the Galliformes, or fowl-like birds, are unquestion- 

 ably low in the scale of avian evolution. In spite of their fine feathers and elaborately 

 specialized plumage characters, neither anatomically nor mentally are they of high rank. 

 They appear also to occupy a rather central place, near the focus of many lines of avian 

 radiation. Of still more arrested development and showing a certain degree of relation- 

 ship is the strange hoatzin, which leads dimly but certainly in the direction of the 

 touracous and cuckoos. The hemipodes are another outlying group, evidently a 

 terminal branch. The sand grouse still more certainly point the way from the Galli- 

 formes to the pigeons. And thus we strive to orient the various groups, and must 

 always fail unless we consider them divorced from all linear classification, and as 

 organisms radiating in the three planes of space. 



One hundred and fifty-eight years ago Linnaeus gave us a fairly homogeneous 

 group which he called Gallinae. This consisted of five genera and twenty-five species. 

 Seven of these latter come within the scope of this monograph — 



Pavo cristatus . 

 Pavo bicalcaratus 

 Meleagris satyra 

 Phasianus gallus 

 Phasianus colchicus 

 Phasianus pictus 

 Phasianus nycthemerus 



Indian Peafowl. 

 Grey Peacock Pheasant. 

 Satyra Tragopan. 

 Red Junglefowl. 

 Common Pheasant. 

 Golden Pheasant. 

 Silver Pheasant. 



Sharpe, in what is perhaps the best of the later general classifications of birds, 

 recognizes a suborder Phasiani, with five families : Tetraonidae, Phasianidae, Numididae, 

 Meleagridae and Odontophoridae. The second family is the one which concerns us. It 

 embraces the partridges and quails of the Old, and the grouse of the New World, the 

 snow cocks, red-legged partridges, francolins, tragopans, pheasants of all species, jungle- 

 fowls, and peafowl. Of the fifty-one genera into which Sharpe divides this assemblage, 

 I have included only twenty-two in this monograph, and these I have reduced to nine- 

 teen. The attempts to subdivide this family have heretofore been of necessity frankly 

 tentative and speculative, or based on some superficial character which invariably 



