150 Notices and Descriptions of various New [Fee. 



colouring be not rigorously adhered to : thus Mr. Gould has coloured 

 it. with a black throat and fore-neck, adding a slight gloss of blue ; and 

 the other naturalists cited have coloured these parts entirely blue, with 

 a white margin separating them from the blue of the rest of the neck. 

 Now the true colouring of the throat and fore-neck is a dull blue, with 

 occasionally a medial rufous patch on the latter, and the feathers being 

 margined with pale greyish; the latter accounts for the white border as- 

 signed by Sir W. Jardine and Mr. Selby: again, the latter naturalists 

 have coloured the tail much too blue, and have also exaggerated the 

 edgings of the wing-feathers, which edging might indeed be erased 

 altogether: the back, too, should have been rendered much darker and 

 more dingy than the head and rump, which, with the shoulder of the wing, 

 are alone bright blue ; and the lores, ear-coverts, and sides of the neck, 

 are black, contrasting with the blue of the crown, and passing into the 

 dusky- bluish of the fore-neck. The females vary a good deal, but have 

 always a much greater admixture of black on the lower-parts and sides 

 of the throat, than is shewn in Gould's figure of this sex ; the ground 

 hue is often, but not always, much more rufous ; and though there is 

 generally a pale mesial space on the throat and fore-neck, even this is 

 in some specimens wholly variegated with the black margins to the 

 feathers. The sexes of the young are conspicuously different in the 

 nestling plumage, from the young males having the wings and tail blue, 

 which in the females are brown, as in the adults respectively ; and the 

 pale central spots to the clothing plumage are also much more rufes- 

 cent in the young males, and albescent in the young females. Common 

 in the Himalaya. 



24. P. longirostris, nobis, n. s. This species I only know from a 

 female, presented to the Society by Captain Boys, who procured it on 

 the march from Scinde to Ferozepore. It is remarkable for the length 

 of its bill, and for the pale greyish colour of its upper-parts, which 

 would indicate that the blue of the male is considerably paler than in 

 the three following species. Length about eight inches and a half, of 

 wing four and a quarter, and tail three and a quarter ; bill to gape an 

 inch and three-eighths, and tarse an inch. Upper-parts light brown- 

 ish-grey, browner on the wings, and greyer on the tail; the lower-parts 

 pale fulvescent-grey, obscurely marked with dusky ; bill blackish, and 



