Page:The birds of America, volume 7.djvu/30

20 toe pectinate. Feathers of head and neck exceedingly small, slender, downy; of the other parts generally lanceolate and acuminate; wings very long, rather narrow, rounded; primaries much curved. Tail short, broad, rounded, of more than sixteen feathers. An enormous bare, extensile, gular sac; tongue extremely small, papilliform; oesophagus excessively wide; proven- tricular glands arranged in broad longitudinal series; stomach very small, with its muscular coat thin, its epithelium smooth and soft; a globular pyloric lobe; intestine long and narrow; coeca very small, cylindrical; cloaca globular.

AMERICAN WHITE PELICAN.

-F Pelecanus Americanus, Jiud. PLATE CCCCXXIL— Adult Male.

I feel great pleasure, good reader, in assuring you, that our White Pelican, which has hitherto been considered the same as that found in Europe, is quite different. In consequence of this discovery, I have honoured it with the name of my beloved country, over the mighty streams of which, may this splendid bird wander free and unmolested to the most distant times, as it has already done from the misty ages of unknown antiquity.

In Dr. Richardson's Introduction to the second volume of the Fauna Boreali-Americana, we are informed, that the Pelecanus Onocrotalus (which is the bird now named P. Americanus) flies in dense flocks all the summer in the Fur Countries. At page 472, the same intrepid traveller says, that "Pelicans are numerous in the interior of the Fur Countries up to the sixty- first parallel; but they seldom come within two hundred miles of Hudson's Bay. They deposit their eggs usually on rocky islands, on the brink of cascades, where they can scarcely be approached; but they are otherwise by no means shy birds." My learned friend also speaks of the "long thin bony process seen on the upper mandible of the bill of this species;" and althoug neither he nor Mr. Swainson pointed out the actual differences otherwis existing between this and the European species, he states that no such appearance has been described as occurring on the bills of the White Pelicans of the old Continent.