ORNITHOLOGICAL NOTES 
Plumage brown, streaked with yellowish rufous ; a whitish patch 
in front of the eye; a triangular white patch on the upper breast, 
but no black band; lower breast pale fulvous, streaked with black- 
ish; beak orange, the culmen and tip black; tail, 2.5 long. 
Habitat, Cayenne and the Amazons. 
Note . — I was not aware when the above was written, that M. de 
Lafresnaye had already pointed out the distinctness of Monasa 
fusca from M. torquata (which he erroneously calls maculata ), in 
the Revue Zoologique, 1848, p. 248. The above remarks amount 
therefore to no more than a confirmation of that eminent ornitho- 
logist’s conclusions. 
VIII.— ON PARUS IGNOTUS, Gmelin. 
Contributions to Ornithology may be quite as usefully effected 
by the sweeping away of error and confusion, as by the collecting 
of positive knowledge. Now there is a nominal species of Parus 
said to inhabit Norway, which has haunted our systems of Ornitho- 
logy for nearly a century, but which no recent observer has recog- 
nised in nature. Brunnich prophetically called it Parus ignotus / 
Latham named it after its supposed discoverer, Parus stromei ; and 
A ieillot went so far as to found a genus for it, under the name of 
Megistina. Still all this book learning was of no avail in adding 
to our knowledge ; the Parus ignotus still refused to fall before the 
gun of the naturalist, or to make its appearance on the shelves of 
our museums. 
This ornithological phantom is, however, at last dissipated by 
Piofessor Sundevall of Stockholm, who in a recent letter to myself, 
has thus replied to my queries about Parus ignotus. As the origi- 
nal is in Swedish, I have thought it best to translate his observa- 
tions. 
As i egards Parus ignotus , it is well known that Gmelin had it 
lorn atham s Synopsis, vol. iv. p. 537; Latham took his descrip- 
tion from Brunnich’s Ornithologia Borealis, p. 73 ; and Brunnich 
mei c y tiansciibed it from Hans Strom’s “Physisk og ookonomisk 
esui yelse over hbgderiet Sondmor, beliggende i Bergens Stift i 
oi ft e. 4 , * orbe, 1762. If now we read the original description 
