COLOR AND GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF BIRDS. 551 
will admit. The other cases cited show only slight (sometimes 
inappreciable) manifestations of this law within the territory of the 
United States. Thus none of my cases were “already published,” 
and, besides, all were in a new geographical field. 
he laws of variation with longitude, which Mr. Allen lays 
down, are the following: 
1. Brighter ‘alone Fy! the birds from the interior, than.of those 
from the Atlantic States; with a tendency to more ferruginous 
tints in some species and to melanism in others. 
2. Brighter or darker colors of the birds from the Pacific coast 
(especially north of the 40th parallel) than of those from the inte- 
rior 
3. Lighter colors of birds from the arid, sterile plains than of 
those from either the eastward or the westward. 
By referring to this paper, it will be seen that all the above 
laws are substantially the same as in the generalizations made by 
Professor Baird in 1866, so that they were at the time of the 
publication already “the common property of ornithologists ;” 
while the proposition that red areas ‘‘spread,” or enlarge their 
field in proportion as we trace certain species toward the Pacific 
coast, and that in the same proportion yellow often intensifies in 
tint, is a law of which Mr. Allen makes no mention, and which 
is, so far as he is concerned, original with me; at the same time 
I claim originality for the cases illustrating both this and the 
foregoing laws, though I have never thought before of claiming 
either the generalizations or the examples as discoveries of my 
own. 
- Having given my defence as far as Mr. Allen is concerned, I 
shall now attend to the cases in which I reduced previously rec- 
ognized “‘ species” to the rank of geographical races, or tt vari- 
eties,” “the implication being, that such nomenclature, and the 
views sustaining it, are novel.” Dr. Coues professes to have antici- 
pated me in several of these cases by using the same nomen- 
clature in his “Key,” and other previous works. How far he is 
justified in this it is my purpose to show. 
The case of Chrysomitris, Dr. Coues claims to have “first worked 
out, in 1866 (Proc. Phila. Acad., 81), exactly as it is here pre- 
sented, although C. psaltria was not there formally brought into 
this connection, as it has since been by us (Key, Oct., 1872, 132, 
13 How much Dr. Coues is entitled to make this assertion 
