36 LOTSY AND KUIPER, A PRELIM. STATEMENT OF THE RESULTS OF MR. 
feathers gain in complexity. The longest hackles are well over 100 mm. 
in length, and strung along the centre of the vane they show as many 
as four distinct, specialized enamellike patches. This is in no sense an 
enlargement of the rhachis or shaft, but a solidification or cornification 
of the vale as a whole. The barbs all run into this area, and distally e- 
merge from it, unchanged as to their position in the vane as a whole. 
The sealing-wax simile is a perfect one. The terminal waxy spot beco- 
mes frayed and split, and when the wear and tear thus becomes appa- - 
rent, it presents the appearance of the margin of a palm-frond. 
The hackles have a wide, desintegrated fringe of grey, the remainder 
of the feather being dark brown or black. The concealed spots are al- 
ways pure white. but the terminal wax may either be white or tinged with 
pigment until it is of a deep yellow ochre +). The free unmodified part of 
the vane may be grey-fringed to the tip, or it, too, may be heavily stai- 
ned with yellow. The extremes of these two colors are birds very unlike 
in appearance, but the variation is dependent neither on age nor locali- 
ty. There is sometimes a hint of a proximal fifth area of specialisation 
and often this is so rudimentary that the modification has affected pig- 
ment only, the node being white but wholly normal in structure. The 
dark portions of most of the longer hackles are strongly glossed with vi- 
olet and purple. 
The hackles, besides extending backwards over the whole mantle- 
plumage, are continued around the sides of the bare neck until they al- 
most meet in front on the lower neck. 
On the lower hind neck the hackles give place abruptly to the normal 
plumage of the mantle. These and the majority of the body feathers 
and the lesser wing-coverts are dark-brown or black-dull in some indi- 
viduals, in others glossed with purple — narrowly edged with grey, and 
with still narrower white shaft-stripes. There is sometimes considerable 
grey mottling in the dark area, regardless of age, but usually this is lost 
in the fully adult bird. 
The purple gloss is accentuated on the rump feathers and in add- 
tion a series of the small, wax-like ornaments appears, and the visible 
fringe is deep orange-red. The shorter upper tail-coverts are bronze- 
purple, the longer ones purplish blue with a marginal band of gree- 
nish. The tail-feathers are black, glossed with bluish-green, on both 
webs in the central, on the outer web alone of the lateral rectrices. On 

1) italics are ours. 
