516 Bulletin American Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XXXVI, 



some extent at least, the characters in question are individual rather than 

 geographic. In any event they do not seem to me to be sufficiently diagnos- 

 tic to warrant the recognition of two forms, and I therefore accept the name 

 mystacalis for the specimens in hand. 



It should be added that comparison of essentially topotypical specimens 

 of " saltuensis" and mystacalis does not reveal the characters attributed to 

 saltuensis by its describer (1. c), whose description leads me to infer that he 

 compared his Colombian birds not with true mystacalis but with an evi- 

 dently unnamed Ecuadorian form of which Richardson secured a single 

 specimen at Esmeraldas, while the National Museum has loaned us a bird 

 (No. 90449) of apparently the same race collected by Buckley at " Jima." 

 This locality is on the Amazonian slope of the Andes southeast of Cuenca 

 and if the specimen is correctly labeled the form it represents has an in- 

 explicable distribution. 



These birds differ from the Academy of Science specimens, and hence I 

 take it from true mystacalis, in having the crown browner, and the under- 

 parts more tawny-olive. True mystacalis has the breast gray, the throat 

 white, with little if any tawny-olive tinge, while the Esmeraldas and Jima 

 birds have the entire underparts from bill to vent, more or less suffused 

 with this color which, on the flanks and abdomen, is particularly strong. 

 In short, these birds differ from true mystacalis much as saltuensis was 

 stated to differ from it. In view of the uncertainty attached to the locality 

 of the Buckley specimen, it seems to me to be at present inadvisable to 

 name this Ecuadorian race. 



Magdalena Valley (La Candela; Andalucia) specimens have the crown 

 somewhat darker, the abdomen more rufous than the average bird from 

 the Cauca region, and thus approach amaurogaster. 



Las Lomitas, 3 ; San Antonio, 3 ; Popayan, 1; Miraflores, 4; Salento, 1; 

 La Candela, 1; near San Agustin, 1 (juv.); below Andalucia (w. slope, 

 3000 ft.), 1. 



(3405a) Pheugopedius mystacalis amaurogaster Chapm. 



Pheugopedius mystacalis amaurogaster Chapm., Bull. A. M. N. H., XXXIII, 1914, 

 p. 179 (Buena Vista, Eastern Andes, Col.). 



Char, subsp. — Similar to P. m. mystacalis but darker above, the aurieulars more 

 solidly black, the submalar stripe broader, the chin and upper throat white but the 

 lower throat and breast washed with ochraceous-tawny, the flanks and abdomen 

 strong ochraceous-tawny, the tail longer. 



Eight specimens of this strongly marked race were collected at Buena 

 Vista where it occurs, doubtless, as a representative of the Subtropical 

 rather than the Tropical Zone, since we did not find it below this point. 



Buena Vista, 8. 



