298 
Lord Walden on Mr. Allan Hume’s 
by dissection. The inconvenient fact stated by Herr v. 
Pelzeln of the Nicobar female having a red maxilla is thus 
disposed of by Dr. Finsch’s friendly censor, now growing 
“ weary of exposing these ” (Dr. Finsch’s) “ perpetual and 
perverse blunders” (t.c. p. 25). This specimen, “allow me 
to inform our author, was unquestionably a male, and had 
been, dissection or no dissection, wrongly sexed! We shot 
and sexed 25 adults of this species .... and we know beyond 
the possibility of a doubt, that Dr. Cantor and Blyth were 
perfectly correct,” etc. etc. (1. &.). It is true that in a note 
quoted by Mr. Moore (P. Z. S. 1859, p. 454) Dr. Cantor 
states that the female has a black bill, and it was Mr. Blyth’s 
foregone conclusion; for he says “ the bill wholly black, as I 
suggested it would be in this sex” (op. cit. 1846, p. 51, 
note). But Dr. Cantor’s opinion on an ornithological question 
could not be accepted as conclusive. An intimate friend of 
my own (many a friendly Manilla have we smoked together in 
Fort William), Dr. Cantor was no ornithologist. An excellent 
ichthyologist and herpetologist, he knew little, and professed to 
know nothing, about birds. What Mr. Hume was going to 
“ know beyond the possibility of a doubt ” in 1874 we again 
humbly submit, at the risk of being tedious, could not have 
been known to Dr. Finsch full five years before. 
I have now shown that the major part of Mr. Hume’s cri¬ 
ticisms of Dr. Finsch’s treatment of these eleven species of 
the genus Palceornis are in a less or greater degree mainly 
founded on perversions, misstatements, or misrepresentations 
of the established facts existing when Dr. Finsch was writing 
f Die Papageien,’ or else on trivial inaccuracies of expression. 
Also that in no single instance do Dr. Finsch’s references to 
Jerdon, Blyth, or other Indian naturalists, when fairly inter¬ 
preted, exhibit even a breath of discourtesy or absence of de¬ 
ference, consistent with freedom of judgment, to any opinion 
expressed, or facts narrated, by them. And although Dr. 
Finsch may, by the light of recent investigations, be shown to 
have arrived at some erroneous conclusions, they were mostly 
logical inferences to draw from the conflicting evidence on 
record at the time he wrote. Towards the close of his article 
