399 
Letters, Extracts, Notices, §*c. 
at least a young bird of Oriolus larvatus in the Turin Museum 
has the bill uniformly black. 
Moreover Finsch and Ilartlaub, in their work ‘ Die Vogel 
Ost-Afrikas/ describe the bill of the young O. larvatus and 
O. monachus (pp. 293, 294) as black (in the dry skin). 
As to Sporeeginthus margaritce Weld-Blundeil and Lovat, 
Bull. B. O. C. vol. x. p. xx (1899) ; Ogilvie Grant, Ibis, 1900, 
p. 130, pi. iii. fig. 1, it agrees very well with the types of my 
Estrilda ochrogaster from Abyssinia (Boll. Mus. Tor. no. 287, 
p. 4, 1897). On comparing my birds with the figure, the 
only difference seems to be in the greater brightness of the 
ochreous colour of the underparts shown in the plate, which 
is probably due to the colorist. 
Yours &c., 
Turin Zool. Mus. T. Salvador*. 
January 1900. 
Strs, —Having received a living specimen of the rare Ross's 
Snow-Goose ( Chen rossi) of Arctic America (which is quite 
different from C. hyperboreus and its allies), I have compared 
the descriptions given of the soft parts of this bird in the 
Catalogue of Birds in the British Museum (xxvi. p. 88), and 
elsewhere, with my specimen. These descriptions are not 
accurate, having been, no doubt, taken from dry skins, 
and I think it may be of interest to state the particulars 
correctly, which are as follows :— 
Bill comparatively a little shorter than in Chen hyper¬ 
boreus. The commissure opens nearly, if perhaps not quite so 
much, as in Chen hyperboreus , and encloses a distinctly black 
space, as in the larger species; this black is most intense in 
the upper mandible and in the upper inner part of the lower 
mandible. In the swollen outside surface of the lower man¬ 
dible the black ends in vertical lines, with bluish flesh-coloured 
divisions between them. Between the vertical line formed by 
the end ofc* the feathering on the sides of the upper mandible 
and the nostrils extends an olive-greenish-grey space, in 
which the skin is marked with more or less horizontal 
thickish wrinkles. On the basal frontal part of the upper 
