UGLIEST BIRD IN THE WORLD 279 
livered by a certain Viceroy of India at a University not 
a thousand miles from Calcutta. 
The scavenger vulture is found all over India; when, 
however, you come to the neighbourhood of Delhi his 
beak becomes less yellow and he grows larger. Need- 
less to say that this is quite sufficient provocation for 
the manufacture of a new species. 
The scavenger vulture of the Punjab is known as 
Neophron perenopterus, This multiplication of species 
is doubtless a very fine thing. But it makes things 
exceedingly unpleasant for the birds that live in the 
region where the races fuse with one another. These 
birds do not know what to call themselves: their bill is 
too yellow to allow their admission into the pevenopterus 
clan, and too dusky for the gimginzanus tribe to have 
anything to say to them. In such a case it would, I 
think, be as well to round off matters by creating a 
third species—Neophron neither-one-thing-nor-the-other. 
Of the feeding habits of Pharaoh’s chicken the less 
said the better. It eats filth of any and every kind, and 
is quite content to subsist upon food which the vultures 
proper reject as unfit for vulturine consumption. Mr, 
Finn puts the matter in a nutshell when he states that 
the bird is “appallingly accommodating of stomach.” 
Most vultures seek their food by soaring high above 
the earth, and thus commanding a wide expanse of 
country. When a vulture espies a carcass it at once 
wings its way earthward. Its neighbour, who is soaring 
at a distance of some miles, sees it depart, and follows 
it. The second bird’s neighbour does likewise, so that 
there are, in quite a short time, half a dozen or more 
