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 176 THE CONDOR Vol. different fr6m any of those laid by the grebes, in so far as I have studied them. Loon's eggs never show any chalky deposit upon them, the shells being more or less glossy and rather thick. In color, they range all the way from a clear drab to a deep vandyke-brown. They may be finely speckled all over with a black-brown, never thickly, or, what is more commonly the case, the spots are large and irregular, in some specimens amounting to heavy blotches. They are extremely difficult objects to photograph, owing to the glossy shells and the markings and ground color both being shades of brown, thus render- ing it difficult to bring out the spots. The series of figures of loons' eggs in Reed's book, cited above, are excellent exemplifications of the difficulties in question. Some of the markings in those figures, as fine as they are in some respects, have evidently been touchd up with a brush prior to reproduction from the photographs. In figure 52 (nos. 11, 12 and ]3) I present three illustrations of Common Loon's eggs I (Gavia immer), kindly selected for me from the elegant collection of the U.S. National Museum by Dr. Charles W. Richmond of the Division of Birds of that Institution. They were photographed by me, natural size, and they well represent the extreme of ground color and markings as well as range. No. 11 was taken in the Adirondack region, New York, and the collector is not known to me (toll. U.S. National Museum, no. 28300). This is the most remarkable loon's egg I have ever seen; it is of a rich olive-drab color, very parsely flecked with very fine brown specks; it measures 3.51x2.25. The beautiful specimen shown in no. 12 is considerably larger (toll. U.S. National Iuseum, no. 17977), as it measures 3.80x2.31; it is elegantly spotted with scattered spots of different sizes of a uniform blackish-brown as shown in no. 12. This egg was collected by George A. Boardman at St. Stevens, New Brunswick; it is a very different looking egg from the one shown in no. 13 of the same figure, which not only is of a much deeper brown, but the blackish- brown markings are, in many instances, much larger, while the egg itself is much smaller, being but 3.48x2.23 (toll. U.S. Nat. Mus., no. 24038, nat. size). This specimen was collected near New Cumberland House, Canada, by Mr. R. McFarlane. In the coloring of these eggs of G. imrner, there is a subtle shade of olive present, and this will account for Reed saying that the ground color of Loon's eggs is of a "dark greenish brown" (loc. cit., p. 7). This writer gives, in the hook cited, fine, natural-size illustrations. of the eggs of G. iramet, G. adamsi, G. arctica, G. pacifica and G. stellata, in fact, all of the species occurring in the avlfauna of this country. I have, in the present paper, figured only those of the Black-throated Loon (G. arctica), and the Red-throated species (G. stellata), for the reason hat, in as much as all the eggs of the different species of our loons so closely resemble each other, I thought it more important to invite attention to varia- tions in form, color and markings in the eggs of one or' two species selected from series. This has been successfully accomplished in figures 53 and 54 (nos. 14-19), where the examples shown are all of natural size. Almost ithout exception, the loon lays two eggs to the clutch and the markings in the case of Gavga immer are never, in so far as I have examined them, most num. erous at the larger end. Audubon, in his account of the "Great Northern Diver" (Common Loon), says: "Of the many nests which I have ex- amined, I have found more containing three than twp eggs, and I am confl-