HOUWINK’S EXPER. CONC. THE ORIGIN OF SOME DOMESTIC ANIMALS 365 
The description: , finely mottled and vermiculated with black” ap- 
plied by BEEBE to the remaining part of the upper plumage of the 
British India birds, fits well the Malaccan bird and the Javanese one, 
but not the hen bought by Mr. HOUWINK, in which the black is rather 
course and shows a tendency — a very pronounced tendency even, 
in some of the feathers of the back — to accumulate in crossbars. 
Moreover some of the tertiaries are clearly pencilled e. g. they possess 
a series of two or more concentric lines running parallell to the edge of 
the feather. rf 
BEEBE does not mention wattles on his British India hens, and MR. 
Percy R. Lowe kindly informed us that none of the bankiva-hens 
in the South Kensington Museum has wattles, nor could we find any 
on the stuffed specimens from Java and Malacca, while VORDERMAN 
makes no mention of them either in his description of a living Javanese 
bankiva (cf. Genetica V p. 20). As a matter of fact all investigators 
‘agree that bankiva-hens have no wattles, except BLYTH, who says that 
they have very small ones. The original bird of Mr. HOUWINK has, in 
the stuffed condition, small, but distinct wattles, considerably larger 
even than those of the partridge-colored bantam 191.4 ©. 
BEEBE describes the comb of bankiva as „sometimes a minute fleshy 
knob, again a low, inconspicuous nodge or ridge”; the Java specimen 
of JUNGHUHN shows, in stuffed condition, hardly any comb. VORDER- 
MAN (1. c. p. 20) describes the living, bird as having ,,rudiments of a 
comb present”, the stuffed malaccan specimen has the rudiments of 
one. Mr. Percy R. Lowe again was so kind to examine the bankiva- 
hens in the British Museum and found that all have a minute (shrun- 
ken) comb, the largest measuring only 5 mm. The comb of Mr. Hou- 
WINK’s original bird is, even in the shrunken condition conspicuous and 
distinctly serrated, 20 mm long and 10 mm high at the distal end, very 
little smaller than that of the partridge-colored bantam 191.4 ©. 
While both BEEBE and VORDERMAN describe the visible portion of 
the secondaries as being vermiculated, those of our bird possess broad 
crossbars on that portion, sometimes very distinct, then again pas- 
sing into coarse vermiculation. These crossbars are still more pronoun- 
ced in the Java specimen of JuNGHUHN (Pl. VII fig. 7) and less dis- 
tinct, but plainly visible, in the case of the malaccan bird. 
As we have seen, no less than 24 out of the 53 bankiva-hens in the 
South Kensington Museum have the secondaries more or less distinctly 
