85 
BLACK-CROWNED BEE-EATER. 
Merops Cuvieri , Le Vaillant. 
Crown, ears, and spot on the throat, black, the latter margined 
below with blue *, chin and stripe over the eye, white ; 
body above, green ; nape, ferruginous. 
Merops Cuvieri, Le VaiU ., pi. 9, Re erne Animal , 2d ed. i. 402, 
note.— -Merops Savigni, Zool. III., 1st Series, plate 76. — Me- 
rops supcrciliosus, Var. C. Lath. Hist, of Birds, iv. 228. 
Our specimens of this very distinct species were 
received some years ago from Sierra Leone, where 
it appears to be common, although we know not, at 
present, whether its range is likewise extended to 
Senegal. It is the only Bee-eater yet discovered 
with a white chin and an isolated black crown ; 
characters which render it so conspicuously distinct, 
that we can only wonder at its being confounded, 
even by Linntean writers, with the Merops superci- 
liosus. It is clearly the var. C., placed under that 
name, in Latham’s History of Birds. 
When illustrating this species upon a former 
occasion, we were erroneously informed that it had 
been named after that inimitably accurate naturalist 
Savigny, and we accordingly published it under the 
name of Merops Savigni ; but M. Cuvier, in the last 
edition of the Regne Animal, has mentioned it as the 
