466 
FEMALE PINE BULLFINCH. 
are a few blackish dots, the plumage at base plumbeous ; the 
back is cinereous, somewhat mixed with orange ; the shafts 
darker ; belly and femorals, pure cinereous ; lower tail-coverts, 
whitish, shafted with dusky ; the wings are four and a half 
inches long, reaching beyond the middle of the tail ; the smaller 
coverts are similar to the back, cinereous, slightly tinged with 
orange ; middle and larger, blackish, margined with whitish 
exteriorly and widely at tip ; the lower coverts are whitish 
grey ; quills, blackish, primaries margined with pale greenish 
orange, secondaries and tertials 'with broad white exterior 
margins ; the tail is three and three quarter inches long, 
blackish, the feathers with narrow pale edges ; feet, dusky ; 
nails, blackish. 
In the young female, the head and rump are tinged with 
reddish. The male represented and most accurately described 
by Wilson, is not adult, but full one year old ; at which period, 
contrary to the general law of nature, it is the brightest, as was 
first stated by Linne, though his observation has since been 
overlooked, or unjustly contradicted. In the adult male, the 
parts that were crimson in the immature bird, exhibit a fine 
reddish orange, the breast and belly being also of that colour, 
but paler ; the bars of the wings, tinged with rose in the young, 
become pure white. 
We have nothing to add to Wilson’s history of this bird. 
Although, after the example of Temminck and others, we 
place this species at the head of the bullfinches, we cannot 
avoid remarking, that its natural affinities connect it most inti- 
mately with the crossbills, being allied to them closely in its 
habits, and in its form, plumage, general garb, and even in 
its anomalous change of colours. The bill, however, pre- 
cisely that of a bullfinch, induces us to leave it in that genus, 
between which and the crossbills it forms a beautiful link ; the 
obtuse point of the lower mandible, but especially the small, 
porrect, setaceous feathers covering the nostrils, as in these 
latter, eminently distinguish it from all others of its own genus. 
These characters induced Cuvier to propose it as a subgenus, 
