ORNITHOLOGY. 
mountains, and probably at a comparatively recent geological 
period the bed of a vast inland sea. 
Unfortunately we know too little of the Yarkand fauna 
to hazard more than a conjecture as to its affinities. Podoces 
is a type per se, the only previously known species being an 
inhabitant of Central Asia. The Falcon is a link between 
African and Arctic types, a desert Gyr-falcon. Its Crested 
Steppe-lark is perhaps nearest to Arabian and African 
forms. Its Stone-chat is equally north African, south 
European, and south-western Asiatic. Its Wren Warbler, 
though possibly rightly assigned to a Himalayan genus, is 
very African in its type, and its Redlegged Partridge, though 
probably most resembling the south Arabian form fC. 
arenarius, nobis) is quite as nearly allied to our Norfolk 
bird as to the southern Himalayan form, with which, how- 
ever, the intermediate Ladak race seems to connect it. On 
the whole, so far as the very scanty evidence before us 
justifies a conclusion, I should expect that further researches 
would prove the peculiar Yarkand avi-fauna to consist 
partly of forms most nearly related to north-east African 
and Arabian types, and partly of locally specialised groups 
unknown elsewhere. 
In Yarkand we have found one at least of the breeding 
haunts of numbers of our Indian winter visitants, whose 
nests and eggs have hitherto been vainly sought for in the 
Himalayas, and of which, though some few individuals 
doubtless bred there, the great mass went, as we knew, 
farther north in summer. 
What became of the vast multitudes of Cyanecula 
suecica, Sylvia curruca, Pipastes trivialis, Philomachus pug- 
nax, Tringa subarquata, and T. Temmincki, Actitis ochropus, 
Totanus glottis, Lanius cristatus, Phylloscopus tristis, and 
P. viridanus, &c., &c., which during the cold season swarm 
over the whole face of the country, has always been a 
puzzle? We now find that Yarkand is one, at any rate, of 
their favourite summer retreats, and that a belt of absolute 
desert, more than 100 miles in width, having an elevation 
of over 15,000 feet, and intersected by numerous more or less 
snow-capped ridges, the lowest passes over which attain an 
