Mr. Howorth on the Variation of Colour in Birds

Abstract

PERMIT me to point out that the fact cited by Mr. Howorth (anteà, p 204) of the similarity between the birds of Western Europe and those of Japan, which, according to him, illustrates “from an unexpected quarter” the viewers expressed in his work “The Mammoth and the Flood,” is by no means so novel as the general reader might, from his communication, suppose. On the contrary it has been before the world for more than half a century, and is, or ought to be, familiar to every well-informed ornithologist since it was in 1835 that Temminck gave (“Manuel d'Ornichologie” Part 3, Introd. pp 1.–liii.) a list of 114 species of birds which he said were common to the Japanese Empire and to Europe. It has subsequently been shown that this number was exaggerated; but, as observed in 1857 by Mr. Sclater, in his classical paper on the geographical distribution of birds, “there can be no question as to the general strong resemblance of the Japanese avifauna to that of Europe” (Journ. Linn. Soc., Zoology, ii. p.134).