LONG-LEGGED PLOVER. 
75 
The ruddy plover is eight inches long, and fifteen in 
extent; the bill is black, an inch long*, and straight; 
sides of the neck and whole upper parts, speckled 
largely with white, black, and ferruginous ; the feathers 
being centred with black, tipt with white, and edged 
with ferruginous, giving the bird a very motley appear- 
ance ; belly and vent, pure white ; wing-quills, black, 
crossed with a band of white ; lesser coverts, whitish, 
centred with pale olive, the first two or three rows 
black ; two middle tail-feathers, black ; the rest, pale 
cinereous, edged with white ; legs and feet, black ; 
toes, bordered with a very narrow membrane. On 
dissection, both males and females varied in their 
colours and markings. 
GENUS L .-~ HIMANTOP US, Brisson . 
225 . HIMANTOPUS NIGRTCOLLIS, VIEILL. 
RECUR VIE OSTRA HIMANTOPUS , WILSON. LONG-LEGGED PLOVER. 
WILSON, PLATE LVI1I. FIG. II. — EDINBURGH COLLEGE MUSEUM. 
Naturalists have most unaccountably classed this 
bird with the genus charadrius, or plover, and yet 
affect to make the particular conformation of the bill, 
legs, and feet, the rule of their arrangement. In the 
present subject, however, excepting the trivial circum- 
stance of the want of a hind toe, there is no resem- 
blance whatever of those parts to the bill, legs, or feet, 
of the plover ; on the contrary, they are so entirely 
different, as to create no small surprise at the adoption 
and general acceptation of a classification, evidently so 
absurd and unnatural. This appears the more repre- 
hensible, when we consider the striking affinity there 
is between this bird and the common avoset, not only 
in the particular form of the bill, nostrils, tongue, legs, 
feet, wings, and tail, but extending to the voice, man- 
ners, food, place of breeding, form of the nest, and even 
the very colour of the eggs of both, all of which are 
tsrikingly alike, and point out, at once, to the actual 
