£79 
Parrots of the Genus Eclectus. 
Dr. Meyer then goes on to show that Bernstein's determi¬ 
nations of the sexes of the specimens he forwarded to the 
Leyden Museum are probably erroneous, as in his three 
years' experience he found the sexes about equally numerous, 
whereas Bernstein's determinations would show great disparity 
in their relative abundance (in one case six males to one 
female, in the other twelve females to two males). The ju¬ 
venile plumage of Eclectus is unfortunately still unknown; 
but Dr. Meyer concludes that it is probably green, from the 
fact that twelve out of fourteen of his red specimens still 
preserve evident traces of green feathers. 
In reply to these arguments Prof. Schlegel* not unnaturally 
hesitates to accept Dr. Meyer's conclusions, because, of 72 spe¬ 
cimens of red Eclecti in the Leyden Museum, 20 have been 
determined by the collectors as males, and the remainder (52) 
as females, and, on the other hand, of 77 green specimens in 
the same museum, 56 are marked as males and 21 as females. 
Hence, if Dr. Meyer be right, a considerable proportion of 
these specimens must have been wrongly sexed by the four 
travellers by whom they were collected, viz. Salomon Muller, 
Bernstein, Hoedt, and Yon Bosenberg. 
Dr. Meyer returns to the charge in a paper in the f Mitthei- 
lungen aus dem k.-k. zoologischen Museum zu Dresden' (l. c . 
p. 11-13). He repeats his former observations, and gives some 
additional ones, amongst which are some remarks on a living 
pair of Eclectus in his possession, green and red, the green bird 
on being introduced to the red at once having become friendly 
with the latter. A green Eclectus that died soon after it came 
into his possession was dissected and turned out to be a male. 
As regards the specimens in the Leyden Museum, Dr. Meyer 
disposes of them by saying that those collected by S. Muller 
have been long in the Museum, and may very probably have 
had their labels transposed—that Bernstein, during the latter 
part of his residence in the Malay archipelago (as he himself 
learned from one of his hunters, who had also collected for 
Bernstein, and knew the latter well), suffered severely from 
illness, and therefore may well have made mistakes in the 
* Mus. Pays-Bas, Psittacidse, 1874, p. 17. 
u 2 
