Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/344

 322 P A R R O T and ivory, with silver wires, but they were professedly esteemed as delicacies for the table, and one emperor is said to have fed his lions upon them ! But there would be little use in dwelling longer on these topics. With the decline of the Roman empire the demand for Parrots in Europe lessened, and so the supply dwindled, yet all knowledge of them was not wholly lost, and they are occasionally mentioned by one writer or another until in the 15th century began that career of geographical dis covery which has since proceeded uninterruptedly. This immediately brought with it the knowledge of many more forms of these birds than had ever before been seen, for whatever races of men were visited by European naviga tors whether in the East Indies or the West, whether in Africa or in the islands of the. Pacific it was almost invariably found that even the most savage tribes had tamed some kind of Parrot ; and, moreover, experience soon showed that no bird was more easily kept alive on board ship and brought home, while, if it had not the merit of &quot; speech,&quot; it was almost certain to be of beautiful plumage. Yet so numerous is the group that even now new species of Parrots are not uncommonly recognized, though, looking to the way in which the most secluded parts of the world are being ransacked, we must soon come to an end of this. The home of the vast majority of Parrot-forms is unquestionably within the tropics, but the popular belief that Parrots are tropical birds only is a great mistake. In North America the Carolina Parakeet, Conurus carolinensis, at the beginning of the present century used to range in summer as high as the shores of Lakes Erie and Ontario a latitude equal to that of the south of France ; and even within the last forty years it reached, according to trust worthy information, the junction of the Ohio and the Mississippi, though now its limits have been so much curtailed. that its occurrence in any but the Gulf States is doubtful. In South America, at least four species of Parrots are found in Chili or La Plata, and one, Conurus patagonus, is pretty common on the bleak coast of the Strait of Magellan. In Africa, it is true that no species is known to extend to within some ten degrees of the tropic of Cancer ; but Pionias robustus inhabits territories lying quite as far to the southward of the tropic of Capricorn. In India the northern range of the group is only bounded by the slopes of the Himalaya, and further to the eastward Parrots are not only abundant over the whole of the Malay Archipelago, as well as Australia and Tasmania, but two very well-defined Families are peculiar to New Zealand and its adjacent islands (see KAKAPO, vol. xiii. p. 825 ; and NESTOR, vol. xvii. p. 354). No Parrot has recently inhabited the Palaearctic Region, 1 and but one (the Conurus carolinensis, just mentioned) probably belongs to the Nearctic ; nor are Parrots represented by many different forms in either the Ethiopian or the Indian Regions. In continental Asia the distribution of Parrots is rather remarkable. None extend further to the west ward than the valley of the Indus, 2 which, considering the nature of the country in Baluchistan and Afghanistan, is perhaps intelligible enough ; but it is not so easy to under- 1 A few remains of a Parrot have been recognized from the Miocene of the Allier in France, by Prof. A. Milne-Edwards (Ois. Foss. France, ii. p. 525, pi. cc. ), and are said by him to show the greatest resemblance to the common Grey Parrot of Africa, Psittacus erithacus, through having also some affinity to the Ring-necked Parakeet of the same country, Palieornis torquatvs. He refers them, however, to the same genus as the former, under the name of Psittacus verreauxi. z The statements that have been made, and even repeated by writers of authority, as to the occurrence of &quot;a green parrot&quot; in Syria (Chesney, Exped. Survey Euphrates and Tigris, i. pp. 443, 537) and of a Parrot in Turkestan (Jour. As. 8oc. Bengal, riii. p. 1007) originated with gentlemen who had no ornithological knowledge, and are evidently erroneous. stand why none are found either in Cochin China or China proper ; and they are also wanting in the Philippine Islands, which is the more remarkable and instructive when we find how abundant they are in the groups a little further to the southward. Indeed Mr Wallace lias well remarked that the portion of the earth s surface which contains the largest number of Parrots, in proportion to its from Celebes to the Solomon group. &quot; The area of these
 * area, is undoubtedly that covered by the islands extending
 * islands is probably not one-fifteenth of that of the four

tropical regions, yet they contain from one-fifth to one- fourth of all the known Parrots &quot; (Geof/r. Distr. Animal*, ii. p. 330). He goes on to observe also that in this area are found many of the most remarkable forms all the red Lories, the great black Cockatoos, the pigmy Nasi- ternae, and other singularities. In South America the species of Parrots, though numerically nearly as abundant, are far less diversified in form, and all of them seem capable of being referred to two or, at most, three sections. The species that has the widest range, and that by far, is the common Ring-necked Parakeet, Pal&ornis torqwcttus, a i well-known cage-bird which is found from the mouth of the Gambia across Africa to the coast of the Red Sea, as well as throughout the whole of India, Ceylon, and Burmah to Tenasserim. 3 On the other hand there are plenty of cases of Parrots which are restricted to an extremely small area often an island of insignificant size, as Conurus xantkola&nms, confined to the island of St Thomas in the Antilles, and Pal&ornis exs^ll to that of Rodriguez in the i Indian Ocean to say nothing of the remarkable instance I of Nestor productus before mentioned (vol. xvii. p. 355). The systematic treatment of this very natural group of birds has long been a subject of much difficulty, and the difference of opinion among those who have made it their study is most striking, for there is hardly an approach to unanimity to be found, beyond the somewhat general belief which has grown up within the last forty years that the Parrots should be regarded as forming a distinct Order of the Class, though there are some men, justly accounted authorities, who even question this much. A few system- atists, among whom Bonaparte was chief, placed them at the top of the Class, conceiving that they were the analogues of the Primates among mammals. Prof. Huxley has recog nized the Psittacomorphx as forming one of the principal groups of Carinate birds, and, by whatever name we call them, that much seems to be evident. It will here, however, be unnecessary to discuss the exact rank which the Parrots as a group should hold, for sufficient on that score has already been said above (ORNITHOLOGY, p. 47), and it is quite enough of a task to consider the most natural or if we cannot hope at present to reach that at least the most expedient way of subdividing them. It must be admitted as a reproach to ornithologists that so little satisfactory progress has been made in this direction, for of that the existing differences of opinion differences as wide as have ever existed in any branch of ornithic taxonomy are sufficient proof. More over, the result is all the more disheartening, seeing that there is no group of exotic birds that affords equal oppor tunities for anatomical examination, since almost every genus extant, and more than two-thirds of the species, have within recent times been kept in confinement in one or another of onr zoological gardens, and at their death have furnished subjects for dissection. Yet the laudable attempt 3 Tt is right to state, however, that the African examples of this bird are said to be distinguishable from the Asiatic by their somewhat shorter wings and weaker bill, and hence they are considered by some authorities to form a distinct species or subspecies, P. docilis; but in thus regarding them the difference of locality seems to have influenced opinion, and without that difference they would scarcely have been separated, for in many other groups of birds distinctions so slight are regarded as barely evidence of local races.