DALMATIAN GOLD-CREST. 
161 
prevented us from coming to any decided opinion 
for ourselves ; but the occurrence lately of a bird 
in a similar state of plumage on our own shores, 
has given fresh interest to the subject, and will 
ultimately enable us to decide whether or not our 
suspicions were correct. Mr Gould received the 
specimen from which his figure is taken from the 
Baron de Feldegg of Franckfort, who shot it in 
Dalmatia in 1829, and by dissection proved it to 
be a male. Mr John Hancock of Newcastle, 
whose attention to the minuter distinctions 
between some of our most closely allied birds 
has been attended with so much success, has sent 
a notice to the Annals of Natural History re- 
garding the capture of a bird on the Northumbrian 
coast, which he considers to agree in every point 
with Mr Gould’s Dalmatian Regulus ; and as a 
reason for considering it as a good species, he 
states, that the covering of the nostril is not com- 
posed of a single plumulet, as in the other known 
Reguli. We transcribe the notice as we got it, 
containing a minute description, and will request 
ornithologists to attend farther to this interesting 
addition : — “I beg to send you a notice of a 
very scarce and interesting species of Regulus, 
which I shot on the banks near Hartley, on the 
coast of Northumberland, on the 26th of last 
September. It corresponds exactly with Gould’s 
H. modestus , a species so extremely rare, that he 
considers the individual from which he described 
as unique in the continental museums. The 
description of my bird, which will now entitle 
