276 
Mr. G. E. II. Barrett-Hamilton on 
the seas which on all sides except the north hem in their 
practically insular home have curtailed and impeded even the 
slight winter-movements southward which their co-species of 
the broad regions of Siberia accomplish unhindered. Thus 
confined and forced to occupy the same ground throughout 
the year, it is possible that even in Kamchatka they may 
have to endure a climate which, taken on the whole and 
not regarded at any particular season of the year, may be 
actually more severe than that of any other Siberian region 
inhabited by their co-species. On the other hand, it may be 
that, when our knowledge of local forms is more extensive, 
we may find that there remain, after all, to be found in some 
hitherto unexplored part of Siberia, representatives of these 
species which are whiter than those of Kamchatka. A case 
in point would appear to be my new Nutcracker, which, 
although whiter than N. caryocatactes of Europe, is not so 
white as the Central Asian N. multipunclata. 
Dr. Stejneger discusses at some length the migration- 
routes of birds found in Kamchatka and in the regions north 
of that country. Little though we yet know of the avifauna 
of these remote regions, that little is sufficient to indicate 
that the migration-route of certain Kamchatkan species does 
not lie directly southward, as might at first sight have been 
expected, through the Kuril and Japanese Islands, but south- 
westwards towards Central Asia. This adherence to a well- 
defined south-westerly migrational route seems to explain the 
total absence from the Kamchatkan Peninsula of so many 
of the Asiatic summer birds of the regions bordering on 
Bering Strait. The trend of these migrational routes is 
held by Dr. Stejneger to mark in the main the tracts by which 
the ancestors of the species affected reached by annual 
extensions of their range their present northern summer- 
quarters. One of the most interesting features of the 
Kamchatkan avifauna is the total absence therefrom of many 
common and widespread genera for which the country 
would appear eminently suitable. An ornithologist cannot 
be long in the country before the absence of Ardeida of every 
sort from the salmon-streams, as well as of Columbid<s from 
