Recent Ornithological Publications. 471 
not so much matter, perhaps, if the characters given were suffi¬ 
cient for the recognition of the species. With regard to the 
supposed new Brazilian Sylvia , every naturalist who has paid the 
least attention to South American ornithology must be aware that 
no bird of this form occurs in the New World at all, the repre¬ 
sentative group of Mniotiltince being readily distinguishable from 
Sylvia and its allies by the want of the first spurious primary. 
Signor Benvenuti would have done better to have followed the 
good advice given to him by M. Auguste Salle, and to have 
taken steps to have his birds compared with specimens in the 
French and English collections before describing them as new 
on his own authority. 
The fourth volume of the Acts of the Italian Society of Na¬ 
tural Sciences* contains several ornithological papers. Signor 
P. Lanfossi writes of Muscicapa albicollis and its allies, M. luctu- 
osa and M. speculigera f, which he proposes to reunite as varieties 
of the same species. The same author also treats subsequently 
(p. 103) of the Sylvians of the genera Calamoherpe and Hip - 
Signor E. Giglioli, who is now working as a student of 
zoology in London, contributes to the same journal an article 
on the geographical distribution of birds, principally translated 
from the Memoir on that subject published in the ‘Journal of 
the Proceedings of the Linnean Society 3 for 1857. 
5. American Publications. 
Mr, Coues’s “Review of the Terns of North America,” pub¬ 
lished in last year’s volume of the e Proceedings of the Phila¬ 
delphian Academy/ has been for some time in our hands, and 
would have been noticed before this, had space permitted it. The 
principal aim of the paper is to give the results of a “ careful 
comparison of the more or less intimately related” North Ame¬ 
rican and European species of this group, which the command 
of a very extensive series of specimens from both continents has 
enabled him to do. At the same time Mr. Coues has discussed 
* Atti della Societa Italiana di Scienze Naturali. Milano, 1863, vol. iv. 
t Intorno ad alcune sorte di Pigliamosche o Muscicape, p. 7 1. 
