mi mmm num mkamuot, 



Euplocamus cuvieri, Temminck. 



Vernacular Names,— [Rat, Aracan ; Yit (Burmese) Aracan}. 



fFT has been customary to consider this species a 

 hybrid, between the Eastern Kalij and the Vermi- 

 cellated Pheasant. 



That it is an intermediate form between these two, 

 and in many respects resembles both, may be freely 

 conceded, but the term hybrid cannot, with any 

 propriety of language, be applied to a permanent 

 species, the sole inhabitant of its class of a vast tract of country 

 in which neither of the species occurs of which it is alleged 

 to be a hybrid. 



By hybrids we understand, when speaking of wild animals, 

 a form, the offspring of two parents of different species, not 

 a persistent race occupying a large tract of country, in which 

 parents and offspring are all precisely alike. 



It may be that both present many features in common with 

 two other species, but this affords no support for the unscien- 

 tific theory of inter-breeding or hybridism which has been so 

 constantly put forward in cases like the present. 



The true explanation of the cases which this theory is meant 

 to explain is simply this : If, in one region A, we find one 

 form a, and in a neighbouring region B, we find a nearly allied 

 form b, and somewhere between the two regions, A and B, or 

 where they inosculate, we find a third form, which we will call 

 c, intermediate between a and b, then this form is clearly due, I 

 submit, not to the inter-breeding of a and b, but to the fact that 

 the physical conditions of existence, which in A determined 

 the form #, and in B the form b, are at the confines of these 

 regions intermediate in character, and have, therefore, given 

 rise to form c intermediate between a and b. 



In this present case, the alleged hybrid is, so far as we 

 know, the sole Pheasant of the class occurring for a length 

 of fully 300 miles in the Aracan Hills. Whether it occurs 

 outside these hills and the forests at their bases, is uncertain. 

 In British Burma it is replaced directly we descend to the 

 valley of the Irrawaddy by E. lineatus, but it may extend into 



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