50 
Mr. D. G. Elliot on the Trocliilidse. 
in the order given. Latham describes^ in his General Syn¬ 
opsis*’ (/. c.)j a Humming-bird^ which he states he received 
from Tobago, as follows :—Length four inches. Bill three 
quarters; colour dusky; the under mandible yellow, except 
at the tip : head, neck, back as far as the middle, and beneath 
as far as the belly, glossy green ; lower part of the back, 
rump, and wing-coverts green, glossed with copper: across 
the lower part of the belly a white bar: thighs white: vent 
and under tail-coverts very pale brown : quills and tail blue- 
black, the last somewhat forked : legs black.*’^ This answers 
excellently for the present species, the chief discrepancy being 
the colour of the under tail-coverts, which in the adult are 
white, streaked with brown. The locality given is also cor¬ 
rect, being one of those in which the T. linncei, Gould, is 
found. To this bird of Latham, Gmelin, in his Systema 
Naturae,^ gave the name of tohaci, changed afterwards by La¬ 
tham, in his ^ Index Ornithologicus,’ to tobagensis. In 1829, 
Lesson (Z. c.) described and figured the species as Ornismya 
viridissima. Mr. Gould, in his monograph (/. c.), calls the 
bird T. linncei, after the name, as he states, proposed for it 
by Bonaparte in the * Bevue et Magasin de Zoologie,^ 1854, 
p. 255. In the article thus referred to (the Conspectus 
Trochilorum , under the genus Thaumantias, Bonaparte 
refers his linncei (no. 245) to Trochilus thaumantiaSy Linn. 
Now the T, thaumantias of Linnseus is not a Thaumatias at 
all, but the Polytmus virescensy auct. (Linnaeus’s name having 
been made into a genus, his species required a new one). Of 
this term the linncei of Bonaparte would be a synonym; and 
therefore M. Bourcier, who is responsible for the synonymy of 
T. tohaci in Mr. Gould’s work, was clearly in error in applying 
Bonaparte’s name to it. If Gmelin’s appellation did not have 
the priority, viridissima of Lesson would be the rightful one 
for the species, Bourcier’s objection, advanced by Mr. Gould, 
that the same specific name may not be applied to two birds 
belonging to the same family, even if of diflPerent genera, being 
untenable. 
T. tohaci is a species of rather extensive range, .as it has 
been obtained in Tobago, Trinidad, Guiana, Venezuela, North¬ 
ern Brazil, and, as stated by Mr. Gould, in the vicinity of 
