THE BIRDS OP AUSTRALIA. 
bird, we cannot now determine, but it probably was not an Australian 
bird 
The acceptance of Gould’s name for the species name is necessary and 
the conclusion I have arrived at is that the figure does not portray the actual 
eye-space of the type specimen. It may be that the skin was badly prepared 
and also that Gould had seen specimens with bare eye-spaces white and 
circular from the islands north of Australia, and concluded that such was 
the case with the Australian specimen. However, Chambers’ specimen, 
which Gould admitted was his species, has the eye-space of the gyymiopis 
type and I have no skin which shows the circular white eye-space, such as is 
seen in the birds of the islands north of Australia. The birds I determined 
as G. san guinea previously I regard now as immature and the eye space is 
slightly elongate. 
Once more I am compelled to put on record what can only be regarded 
as a tentative arrangement, though records of thousands of buds are freely 
written about, no long series have been collected. The puzzling item is that 
the series available still snow constancy in local variation and consequently 
I cannot easily lump any sub-species. To begin with, no series can be 
studied from Port Essington, the type locality of C. sanguinea, only one bird 
being in the British Museum, the specimen collected by Capt. Chambers. 
This has a short wing but might be immature. However, Ramsay ( Cat. 
Austr. Psitt., p. 6, 1891) gives the wing measurement of a male and female 
from Port Darwin as 10.5 and 10.7 inches respectively, while listing the whig 
measurement of a male from Derby, North-west Australia as 11.8 inches. 
My own series of Melville Island birds I measure as varying from 270 
to 275 mm. in the males, and 263 to 268 mm. in the females. I am regarding 
these as typical until series are comparable from the mainland and writing 
my C. s. apsleyi as synonymous. 
There can be no doubt that the North-west birds are larger, but the 
largest of all come from the Alligator River, comparatively near to Port 
Essington. I am inclined to join the two forms I indicated from the North- 
west and from the Alligator River at the present time, but this means the 
recognition of the West Australian form as it is smaller in every way. Then 
the birds from South Australia, New South Wales and Queensland might 
be lumped as these agree fairly well and only occur in the interior of these 
provinces. I have, however, a series from Normanton which are all small 
and it is difficult to decide what to do with them. If the above be accepted 
until long series are collected, little harm will be done, but it is not clear 
to me why the variation should be so peculiarly localised. Were the birds 
coloured it is possible that alteration in colour might have given us the truth, 
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