. 266 A MONOGRAPH OF THE PHEASANTS 
green gloss near the tip, the fringe, however, retaining its rufous-brown colour. The 
convexity is hardly apparent, and the shape is less truncate than in the adults. The new 
upper-mantle plumage has only a faint gloss of green, this appearing first as two sub- 
terminal foci or eyes in the centre of the webs. The hackles of the rump are transitional 
between the juvenile and adult, broad, with stubby, tapering extremities and a very wide 
disintegrated fringe of pale yellow. The black centre is often mottled with buff and 
brown. The coverts are even less advanced, and in place of the orange red, show only a 
faint rusty-yellow fringe. The upper tail-coverts are all bordered with yellow-buff, and 
very imperfectly glossed with green. The tail-feathers have buff edgings, and the 
secondaries a series of large, reddish-buff spots on the outer web, the whitish bars and 
spots having been eliminated. The new ventral plumage shows a diminishing of the 
red-brown, and a corresponding increase of black. 
This is the more usual style of moulting, where a gradual transition carries the 
bird only part way to the final colouring and patterning. A week one way or the other 
would doubtless make considerable difference in the retention or elimination of juvenile 
characters. In fact, we have absolute proof of this in the secondaries taken as a whole 
in a moulting bird of this age. The sequence of moult being from the outer to the inner 
feathers, the new outer feathers are well marked with juvenile characters, while as we 
proceed inward, the adult colours become more and more pronounced, the manufacture 
of the immature buffy giving way to the melanism of the adult. 
Now and then, in fact in about twenty-five per cent. of the young cocks which I 
have seen, a very interesting condition is found, usually confined to the tail and its 
coverts, never occurring on the wings, but occasionally on the body plumage. The 
change from youth to adult is sudden: twenty-four hours at most sees all the pigmenta- 
tion altered, all the imperfect patterning of the juvenile repressed and succeeded at once 
by perfect gloss and specialized shape of the adult cock’s plumage. Widespread as this 
appears to be, it is assuredly abnormal, for the plumage suffers, and the majority of the 
feathers soon break at the point of demarcation. In such a bird, some of the side coverts 
may be of very recent growth, and hence adult in colour; other old lateral coverts are as 
completely juvenile, but the recently sprouted feathers will have been caught half-way. 
The terminal half of each feather is the purely juvenile, or feminine, mottled brown. 
Then comes an abrupt change, and without transition appears the adult condition, in 
width, curvature, colour and size of shaft and web, strong metallic gloss and all. The 
sudden increase in the weight of the feather and the diameter of the shaft has resulted 
in a top-heavy weakness, and all but one of the feathers affected have broken off, the 
break occurring in the shaft, and not in the barbs. The point of chief interest in this is 
not the details of the phenomenon itself, as it is clearly abnormal, but the possibility, as 
shown by the twenty-four-hour growth of the webs, of the entire secretion of the bird’s 
pigment changing within so short a space of time. 
Abnormal though it is, this condition is at least understandable, but in two of the 
birds in the Buitenzorg Museum, and in several which I have shot, a state of affairs still 
more remarkable is found. The sequence is reversed. That is, the terminal portion of 
the feather, which of course first grew out, is altogether adult, black, and iridescent 
green, while the last two-thirds to appear are quite juvenile. Here the adult pigmenta- 
tion must have come into action and then abruptly, within the space of a day, have 
