368 Letters, Extracts from Correspondence, Notices, fyc. 
p. 55, where I referred to what I supposed to be a Philippine 
specimen obtained at the dispersal of the former Macao 
Museum. In the crimson colouring of its entire upper parts 
this species resembles the Brachypternus ceylonus, and bears 
a similar relationship to its Indian congeners, the different 
orange-backed Woodpeckers appertaining to the genera Chry- 
socolaptes, Brachypternus, and Chrysonotus (v. Tig a). In like 
manner, certain other birds are of a deeper or darker hue in 
Ceylon, e. g. Corvus splendens and Acridotheres tristis; but 
the Hypsipetes of Ceylon is more like H. psaroides of 
the sub-Himalayan region than the darker H. ganeesa, Sykes 
(v. unicolor , Jerdon), of S. India. We know, however, com¬ 
paratively little of the special ornithology of the extreme 
south of the Indian peninsula, where a nearer approach to 
certain Cinghalese modifications may yet be proved to occur. 
In the Tenasserim provinces, I remarked that the common House 
Maina ( Acridotheres tristis) was dark-coloured, as in Ceylon; 
and the familiar Crow of all that region, from the valley of the 
Irawadi to beyond Ava, southward to Mergui, is even darker 
than the Cinghalese variety of C. splendens, and moreover has a 
much shriller ordinary caw, which is a more remarkable dis¬ 
tinction. Otherwise the Burmese Crow exactly resembles the 
Indian C. splendens, except that the grey of the plumage must 
be looked for to be observed at all, and then appears very 
faintly. At Akyab the regular Indian C. splendens is numerous, 
and has spread to Kyuk Phoo; but elsewhere in Arakan there 
is only the C. culminatus, the range of which extends southward 
down the Malayan peninsula at least as far as Malacca, and this 
is probably the supposed C. corax of Raffles's list of the birds of 
Sumatra. The black and shrill-voiced race of C. splendens does 
not appear to inhabit the Malayan peninsula; at least it is not 
found in Penang, Malacca, or Singapore, and, like the corre¬ 
sponding ordinary Crow of India, it only occurs where there is 
a dense human population. But in Malacca, or its vicinity, is 
found the C. macrorhynchus, Vieiliot, a very distinct black Crow, 
which Mr. Moore has lately described in the Catalogue of the 
late India-House collection by the name C. tenuirostris, and under 
the supposition that it had been killed in Bombay ! I have seen 
