
178 BITTERNS. 
Third, the Pencilled Bitterns, such as Tigrisoma melanolo- 
pha (black necked) of Ceylon and Burmah, and probably 
of the Malay peninsula; Zebrilus undulatus (wavy) of Gui- 
ana, and Tig. Braziliensis, whose name denotes its habitat. 
This last is the most beautiful of the family, its back being 
black, thickly and delicately pencilled with white and rufous ; 
primaries, dark slate; crown, clear bright, and nape clear 
dark rufous. In front alone does the bird resemble our own, 
and even there the colors are brighter and more clearly de- 
` fined. 
No part of ornithological research is more fascinating than 
the study of feathers; the more we examine them the more 
we must be lost in admiration of their beauty. I have never 
seen more beautiful feathers than those of the American 
Bittern. The ones I am at present examining, though they 
have been plucked from the bird more than a year, retain 
a beautiful gloss, hardly inferior to that they wore in life. 
Both webs of the primaries, and the anterior one of the 
secondaries, have a lovely bloom of a most delicate ashy 
blue. There is a very regular gradation in texture, colora- 
tion, position of the shaft in the vane, and in most particu- 
lars of shape, from the first primary to the last tertial, the : 
former being very dense, strong, of a clear unflecked slaty : 
blue, with but one or two mere hairs of down; end acutely 
angled, with the shaft very near the anterior edge ; the latter 
very loose in texture, so weak that a mere touch serves 
to tear its fibres apart; in color slaty brown, most finely 
marked with wavy lines of rusty brown, and not only very 
downy three-fourths of the distance to the tip, but furnished 
with a very soft accessory plume, three inches long and two 
. wide: the tip widely rounded, and the shaft at the very 
centre. Besides these differences, there is also observable 
a certain indefinite youthfulness, if I may so express it, 0 
color, which distinguishes the tertials from the secondaries ; 
and the secondaries again have an immature, diffident ap- 
. pearance of texture, as compared with the primaries. No 

T Ree een REP Na oor 
R PDA NETT LA 



