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Show 1 5 0 MR. J. LEWIS BONHOTE ON HYBRID BUCKS. [Mar. 7 , those varieties which had proved successful. If by hybridisation we again gave variation its play, it would be only natural that a large number of the varieties produced should bear a resemblance to existing species; but, on the other hand, if this view held good, the unsuccessful varieties should also appear, which was shown to be the case among those individuals some of the characters of which could be referred to no known species. Reference was made to a paper by the author*, recently read before the Linnean Society, in which he had pointed out that patches of colour or absence of colour tended to show themselves first of all on certain fixed parts of the body, on both mammals and birds, and for which the name " poecilomeres" had been given. He then demonstrated that the variations occurring on these hybrids all followed the lines of the poecilomeres. As illustrating the foregoing remarks, Mr. Bonhote exhibited : (1) A male Teal in full plumage, shot wild near Cambridge, and showing on the neck the ring of the Mallard. (2) A Sabine's Snipe, in which the back and tail-feathers were shown to approximate to the Great Snipe rather than to the Common Snipe. This was a constant feature in all the true Sabine's Snipe that he had examined. These were exhibited as being instances of natural varieties, showing characters more or less resembling those in other species. A duck was also shown which had recently been shot in England, and brought to the British Museum. There could be but little doubt that it represented a cross between a Pintail and Wigeon, since the back, with the exception of the scapulars, resembled that of a Pintail, and the breast that of a young Wigeon drake. The head, however, was very peculiar, the crown showing a mixture of Pintail and Wigeon, while a patch behind the eye, resembling that found in the Teal, was of a dull metallic bronze ; the sides of the face showed an irregular line of rufous buff, and the chin was dull brownish black. It was worthy of note that the metallic patch was clearly noticeable, though not so marked, in the American Wigeon; while the buff stripe across the face was found in the New-Zealand Duck. Attention was called to a pair of Sheldrake-Call-duck crosses, which had been bred at Kilberry, as stated in the ‘ Field ' of the 25th February, 1905, and kindly sent to the author by Mr. Campbell. Whether or not they were hybrids, Mr. Bonhote could not say ; but the interest lay in the fact that all the Call-ducks there were of the colour of the wild Mallard, and that these specimens (as they could see) differed in having assumed patches of white, and these patches all followed the lines of poecilomeres, and showed clearly that the metallic patch of the Teal, which had been present in so many of the crosses, was in this case visible, though to a much slighter extent, as a white patch. Lastly, there was exhibited a pair of living birds representing * Journ. Linn. Soc., Zool. xxix. p. 185 (1901). |
