56 
BLACK -BELLIED PLYCATCIIER. 
paring their accompanying descriptions, the orni- 
thologist will immediately perceive that they are 
essentially different, notwithstanding their general 
similarity in the rufous colour of the back and 
the glossy black of the head and throat. The 
colouring, in fact, of nearly the whole of this sub- 
genus is so much the same, that it is not surprising 
Linnajus should have looked upon those then known 
to him as mere varieties of each other. The same 
excuse, however, cannot he urged for his followers, 
more especially after the clear and circumstantial 
details made known by Le Yaillant of the different 
habits and peculiarities of those he discovered in 
Southern Africa. And yet so little have modern 
ornithologists availed themselves of these invaluable 
memoirs, that up to this day we find them all 
thrown together under the common name of Mu- 
scipeta paraduea , which is pronounced to be a 
“ most variable species so that nearly all the types 
of a genus are thus included under one specific 
name. As some advancement to a better knowledge 
of these species, we have subjoined, at the end of 
this article, the specific descriptions of all those 
which have been found by Le Vaillant in Southern 
Africa, and which still remain, as we believe, un- 
recorded by scientific names or characters, leaving 
undetermined two or three others which have been 
but obscurely mentioned in other works. 
We have no information on the natural history 
of the particular species now under consideration; 
hut as its structure is precisely similar to that of the 
