rates the black plaques of the temples, and the upper part [Podoces Panderi.] manners of M. Temminckii, when on the ground, are said much to resemble those of the English blackbird. It may be questionable whether this group is properly placed among the Corvida. Example, Myophonus flavirostris (metallicus, Temm Entirely of a deep blue-black with metallic tints. Bill of a beautiful vellow. Feet black. Locality, Java. [Picathartes gymnocephalus. Podoces. This genus was founded by M. Fischer, for a bird discovered by Dr. Pander, in the country of the Kirguis beyond Oremburg, whose habits of life are analogous to those of the crows, among which M. Lesson thinks it ought to be placed. Generic character.--Bill moderate, of the length of the Example, Podoces Panderi. Greenish glaucous above; [Myophonus flavirostris.] COR Ptilonorhynchus. Bill strong, robust, widened, rather long, upper basal termination convex but little marked; point recurved; upper mandible presenting two small notches at its extremity; edges a little swollen; lower mandible slightly convex; commissure of the mouth straight, simple. Nostrils basal, lateral, furnished with short bristles. Wings short, rounded. Tail moderate, graduated. Feet slender. (Lesson). The genus, as modified by Lesson, contains but two species. He thinks that it would be better placed among the Dentirostres at the side of the Choucaris (Graucalus, Cuv.), but he allows that it has all the forms of the Rolliers (Coracias) and of the crows. Locality, the warmest islands of the West Indian Archipelago. Example, Ptilonorhynchus Sinensis, Coracias Sinensis, Lath. Body above pale aqua-marine green clouded with yellowish-green. Forehead furnished with silky round feathers, turned in different directions; feathers of the nape long, unravelled as it were, and capable of being erected into a tuft-both of a yellowish-green. A black band taking its rise from the angle of the bill surrounds the eye and nape. Throat and cheeks of a yellowish-green. Lesser wing coverts brown. Quills brown, inclining to olive externally, and chestnut internally; the three last progressively terminated with greenish white. Bill red, surrounded by a few black bristles; feet reddish. Size eleven inches. Locality, the Philippine islands. this, which has the general characters of the Rolliers and Rolles (Colaris). The birds composing the genus are exclusively peculiar to New Holland and the temperate zone. (Lesson.) Example, Kitta holosericea, Temm.; Ptilonorhynchus ho-. losericeus, Kuhl; Satin Grakle, Latham; Ptilonorhynchus Mac-Leayii, Latham MSS., Vigors and Horsfield. Male, very brilliant blackish-blue. Quills and tail-feathers dead black. Bill and feet yellow. A double row of silky and velvety bluish-black feathers at the base of the bill. Length thirteen inches. The female has the upper parts of an olive-green. The quills and tail feathers of a red-brown; wing coverts varied with brown and a colour inclining to olive; lower parts greenish, barred with black. There are whitish horizontal spots, lanceolated and bordered with black, on the front of the neck. Mr. Caley says (Vigors and Horsfield, Linn. Trans., vol. XV., p. 264) that the male of this species is reckoned a very scarce bird, and is highly valued. The natives call it Coury, the colonists Satin Bird. I have now and then met with a solitary bird of this species: but I once saw large flocks of them on some newly-sown wheat, from whence they fled, on being scared, into a neighbouring brush; when all was again quiet they soon returned to the wheat. They did not leave the brush above a few yards. There were no black ones among them, nor can I affirm that they were feeding on the wheat. [Ptilonorhynchus Sinensis.] The other species, according to Lesson, is Kitta thalassina, Temm. Kitta. Kita holosericea] Nucifraga. Bill long, thick,' with cutting edges terminating in a blunt point, furnished with setaceous feathers at the base, the upper mandible longer than the lower. Nostrils round, open. Wings pointed; fourth quill longest. Till the publication of Mr. Gould's Nucifraga hemispila, (see Century of Birds,') but one species was known, viz., that which we select as the example. The Nutcracker, Nucifraga Caryocatactes, Brisson; Ca is the Casse-noix of the French, the Tannenheher of the Germans, the Noddekrige of the Danes, the Not-kraake of the Norwegians, and the Aderyn y cnau of the antient British. Bill short, convex, compressed on the sides; upper man-ryocatactes nucifraga, Nils. Corvus Caryocatactes, Lin, dible with the basal termination recurved, and depressed sides; the point sharp and furnished on each side with a small projecting tooth, borders of the mandibles thick, recurved, and covered at the commissure. Nostrils basal, transversal, hidden by the silky feathers of the forehead, and by a row of small bristles. Wings pointed. Tail equal, rounded. Feet robust; toes equal; hallux strong. (Lesson.) Lesson, who places in this genus Kitta holosericea, Ptilonorhynchus Smithii and Kitta virescens, says that what was observed as to the last-mentioned genus is applicable to Description.-Somewhat less than the jackdaw: the bill straight, strong, and black. Head, neck, breast and body, rusty brown. Crown of the head and rump plain, the other parts marked with triangular white spots. Wings black, Coverts spotted like the body. Tail rounded at the end. black, tipped with white. Legs dusky. Locality, most 1 1 parts of Europe: but C. Bonaparte does not notice it in his | sticks, so that there are instances of houses being set on fire Specchio Comparativo.' Pyrrhocorax. Bill moderate, compressed, subulate, rather slender, furnished at the base with feathers directed forwards, and at the extremity of the upper mandible with two small teeth which are often wanting. Nostrils, basal, ovoid, open, hidden by bristles. Feet robust, claws strong and recurved. Fourth and fifth quills longest. These birds, the Choquards of the French, live in troops like the jackdaws, which they resemble in their manners. They inhabit the high mountains of Europe, and especially the snowy regions of the Alps. They are omnivorous, feeding on insects, worms, soft fruits and seeds. They moult once a year, and the sexes are alike externally. Example. Pyrrhocorax Pyrrhocorax. Brilliant black, but the colour is dull in youth, and the bill and feet are black. In the adult bird the black presents iridescent and changeable tints varying to greenish, the bill is yellowish, and the feet bright red. The female lays four white eggs, spotted with dirty yellow; the nest is in holes of the rocks. Locality, Alps of Switzerland. C. Bonaparte (Specchio Comparativo') notes it as rare, and as only occurring in the Apennines. Fregilus. Bill longer than the head, slender, entire, arched, pointed. Nostrils covered with feathers directed forwards. M. Lesson is of opinion that this genus ought to be united with the last, from which it only differs in having the bill longer and more curved, which made Cuvier place it in the tribe of Tenuirostres near the Hoopoes (Upupa). The species have the manners, habits, and general organization of the crows. And the European species (selected here as an example) perfectly resembles Pyrrhocorax. (Lesson.) Pyrrhocorax graculus, Temm. Corvus graculus, Linn. The Cornish Chough, or Red-legged Crow, is considered by Belon, on no bad grounds, to be the Koparías (Corakias), the Kopúvn povikópuуkoç (Red-billed Crow) of the Greeks, and the Pyrrhocorar of the Latins; Spelvier, Taccola, Pason, Zorl, of the modern Italians (Belon); Choucas aux pieds et bec rouge, Choquar, Chouette rouge of the French (Belon); Stein-tahen and Stein-frae of the Germans, and Bran big goch of the antient British. Back beautifully glossed with blue and purple. Legs and bill bright orange, inclining to red. Tongue almost as long as the bill, and a little cloven. Claws large, hooked, and black. The chough builds its nest in high cliffs or ruined towers, and lays four or five eggs, white, spotted with dirty yellow or light brown and ash colour. Locality.-In Britain: Devonshire, Cornwall, and Wales. Pennant says that it is found in different parts of Scotland, as far as Straithnavern, and in some of the Hebrides. He also states that it is found in small numbers on Dover cliff, where they came by accident; a gentleman in that neighbourhood had a pair sent as a present from Cornwall, which escaped and stocked those rocks. They sometimes desert the place for a week or ten days at a time, and repeat it several times in the year. Montagu, speaking of this locality, says, 'We believe the breed in those parts is again lost.' Dr. Latham states that it is also said to frequent the South Downs about Beachy Head and Eastbourne, where it is called the Red-billed Jackdaw. With regard to its general geographical distribution, Pennant observes that we do not find it in other parts of Europe except England and the Alps. In Asia the island of Candia produces it. In Africa,. Egypt; which last place it visits towards the end of the inundations of the Nile. He quotes Pliny, Brisson, Belon, and Hasselquist, for these statements. The editor of the last edition of Pennant says that the chough inhabits the lofty cliffs about the mid region of the highest mountains of Greece, but never the maritime parts as with us. Scopoli speaks of it in Carniola, and says that the feet of some during autumn turn black. These were probably young birds. The Cornish chough is easily tamed, and may be taught to speak. One in Colonel Montagu's possession would stand quietly for hours to be soothed and caressed, but would resent an affront both with bill and claws. It is,' says Pennant, active, restless, and thieving; much taken with glitter, and so meddling as not to be trusted where things of consequence lie. It is very apt to catch up bits of lighted by its means; which is the reason that Camden calls it incendiaria avis.' Several of the Welsh and Cornish families bear this bird in their coat of arms. There are foreign species, Fregilus leucopterus, Vigors and Horsfield, Pyrrhocorax leucopterus, Temm., from New Holland, where it is called by the natives Waybung, according to Mr. Caley, and Fregilus Enca, of Horsfield, from Java, for instance. For a bird of t er characters as several pa the Thru ea migra, uvier codes (DONACIÓN PACHECO) BIBLIOTECA come under the genus Turdus (Merle de la Nouvelle | beech. The seed consists of a roundish embryo, with thick it.' No description can convey any idea of the brilliancy of this bird. The metallic tints of almost every hue, varying with the play of the light on the plumage, almost surpass belief. It is well figured in Le Vaillant's 'Oiseaux de Paradis,' pl. 20 and 21; but no colouring can give the slightest notion of its splendid intensity and variety. The form may be imagined from the annexed cut taken from the plates above mentioned. FOSSIL CORVIDE. Dr. Buckland mentions the remains of the raven as occurring in the cave at Kirkdale, and figures the right ulna of one of those birds in Reliquiæ Diluvianæ,' plate xi. The other allied forms alluded to in this article, viz. Crypsirina, Epimachus, Eulabes, &c., will be adverted to under those titles. CORVO, one of the Azores, or Western Islands, and the northernmost of the whole group, lying 10 miles N. of Flores. It is high to the north, and slopes gradually to the south; it contains about 750 inhabitants, and produces the best wheat of all the Azores ; cattle, sheep, and hogs are abundant, but wood and water are scanty. It has only a small port for the boats trading among the islands. It is three miles long and two broad. The north point is in 39° 44' N. lat., and 31° 0' W. long. CORVUS, the Crow, sometimes Hydra et Corvus, because this constellation, in fact, contains a part of the body of Hydra, on which the bird rests. In Aratus, Hydra, Crater, and Corvus form one constellation. There are my thological stories, apparently not very antie.., in Hyginus. CORYLA'CEE, a highly important natural order of apetalous or incomplete exogens, consisting of trees or shrubs, chiefly natives of the colder parts of the world, and valuable either for the nuts they bear or the timber they produce. The oak, the beech, the hazel, the hornbeam, and the sweet chestnut, all belong to this order, the general character of which is briefly this: leaves alternate, usually serrated, often with veins running straight from the midrib to the margin, beyond which they slightly project; at the base of each leaf a pair of membranous stipules. Flowers monoecious. The males in catkins; the females in budlike clusters. Stamens from five to twenty, arising from the scales of the catkin. Ovary inferior, crowned by a toothed obsolete calyx, seated in a membranous cup or involucre, with more cells than one, and as many styles as cells; ovules solitary or in pairs, pendulous; all the ovules except one, and all the cells, disappear after the flowering is over, and when the fruit is ripe there is but one cell and one seed, whatever their number may originally have been. Fruit, a nut (called also acorn, mast, &c.), enclosed within a peculiar kind of involucre or cupule, composed of bracts more or less united together, and forming a cup in the oak, a husk in the filbert, and a spiny case in the chestnut and No. 476. [Flowers of the Hazel Nut.] 1. a branch, with the male flowers in drooping catkins; the females in bud-like clusters. 2, one of the scales of the male catkin, with the stamens attached to it. 3, a female bud, with the styles projecting beyond the bracts. 4. the young ovaries with the bracts removed. 5, a section of the ovary, exhibiting the ovules, the toothed calyx, and the base of the style. 6, a cross section of the ovary. 7, a longitudinal section of a nut. CO'RYLUS, the genus of plants after which the natural order Corylaceæ receives its name. It consists of the different species of hazel-nut, and is distinguished from the genera associated with it by its cupule being a two-leaved lacerated husk, and its ovary having but two cells, in each of which is one ovule. The species are the following: 1. C. avellana, the common hazel-nut. This plant, which is a native of all the cooler parts of Europe, Northern Asia, and North America, is the parent of the many varieties of nuts and filberts now cultivated for their fruit. [HAZELNUT, FILBERT.] It is specifically known by its husks being hispid with glands, leafy, broad, much lacerated, and rather spreading at the point; never contracted into a long tube, nor divided into narrow rigid segments; by its roundish, heart-shaped, very rugose, angular, toothed, cuspidate leaves, glandular-hispid branches, and shrubby habit. It varies very much in the form of its husks, in the degree of their hispidity, some being nearly smooth, in the shape of the nuts, and in the height to which it grows. In the hazel-nut the husk is open at the point, shorter, or at least but little longer than the nut, and nearly smooth; while in the filbert (Corylus tubulosa of some writers), it is lengthened considerably beyond the nut, and covered more or less with glandular hairs; all degrees of intermediate structure may be found in the cultivated varieties. The C. Americana of botanists is not distinguishable even as a variety. There is a pretty purple-leaved kind in shrubberies. 2. C. rostrata, the horned hazel-nut. In this the branches are quite free from glandular hispidity, the leaves are oblong, not cordate, doubly toothed, and acuminate, and the husks globular over the nuts, where they are extremely hispid, without ever being glandular; beyond the nuts the husks are contracted into a tube an inch or more long, and irregularly lacerated at the point. A very distinct species inhabiting the mountains of the Carolinas, where it rarely exceeds three or four feet in height. In gardens it is scarcely larger. 3. C. colurna, the Constantinople nut. A white-barked tree, twenty feet and more high, with an erect trunk and a dense spreading head. The leaves are shining, much less rugose than in the the hazel-nut, cordate, angular, serrated, acute or acuminate, slightly hairy on the under surface. The branches and all the other parts are destitute of glands; the husks are campanulate, deeply cut into narrow hairy rather falcate segments. The nuts are roundish and very hard. A native of Asia Minor, and known from all the other garden species by its becoming a tree. It seldom produces its nuts in this climate. Besides these, there are the C. lacera and C. ferox, two species found in the Himalaya mountains. Of these, the former, gathered in Kumaon, is hardly different from C. colurna; the other, from Mount Sheopore, has narrow taper-pointed leaves, and excessively hard nuts, enclosed in a husk, with divaricating narrow spiny divisions. CORYMB, a form of inflorescence approaching very nearly to the raceme. The raceme consists of an axis, upon which all the flowers are disposed upon footstalks of the same length; and hence its figure is more or less cylindrical. A corymb consists of an axis, the lowermost flowers on which have very long stalks, and the uppermost very short ones, so that the mass of inflorescence is an inverted cone, as in candytuft and many other cruciferous plants. The corymb is, in fact, an umbel with a lengthened axis. From this word is derived the term corymbose, which is applied not only to flowers, but to any kind of branching in which the lowermost parts are very long and the uppermost very short, as is the case in most species of Aster. CORYMBI FERA. [COMPOSITE.] CO'RYPHA, a genus of East India palms, with gigantic fan-shaped leaves. Their flowers consist of a three-toothed calyx, three petals, six stamens, and a three-celled ovary. The fruit is composed of round one-seeded berries. Of the species two in particular deserve mention. One, the Tara or Talliera, Corypha talliera, is an elegant stately species inhabiting Bengal. Its trunk is about thirty feet high, and as nearly as possible of equal thickness throughout. The leaves are in about eighty divisions, each six feet long by four inches broad, radiating from the point of a leaf-stalk from five to ten feet long, and covered with strong spines at its edge. Roxburgh describes the spadix as decompound, issuing in the month of February from the apex of the tree and centre of the leaves, forming an immense diffuse ovate panicle, of about twenty or more feet in height. The fruit is the size of a crab-apple, wrinkled, dark olive, or greenish-yellow. The leaves are used by the natives of India to write upon with their steel stiles, and for other purposes. The other, the Tala or Talipat palm, Corypha umbraculifera, is a native of Ceylon, and similar in appearance; but its leaves are not so round as those of the Talliera, the divisions in the centre being shorter than those at the sides. The trunk grows sixty or seventy feet high; the leaves are fourteen feet broad and eighteen long, exclusive of this stalk, and they form a head about forty feet in diameter. Fans of enorrious size are manufactured from this plant in Ceylon; the pith of its trunk furnishes a sort of flour from which bread is made; the leaves make excellent thatch, and are used for writing on like those of the Talliera. CORYPHÆNA (Linnæus), a genus of fishes of the section Acanthopterygii and family Scombrida. The group of fishes formerly included under the head Coryphaena is now subdivided, and the subdivisions may be either termed subgenera of the genus Coryphæna, or the group may be looked upon as a sub-family, and the subdivisions as genera. The principal characters of this group are as follows:-Body elongated, compressed, covered with small scales; dorsal fin extending the whole length of the back (or nearly so); branchiostegous rays generally seven in number. These fishes have commonly a long anal fin, in some extending from the tail almost to the ventral. The tail is more or less forked, and the pectoral fin is usually arched above and pointed. Considering Coryphaena as a genus, the following are the subgenera:-Coryphaena (proper), Caranxomorus, Centro lophus, Astrodermus, and Pieraclis. The species to which the name Coryphæna is now restricted have the head much elevated, and the palate and jaws both furnished with teeth. These fishes are very rapid in their motions, usually of large size, and they prey, upon the flying-fish. Coryphaena hippurus (Linn.), a species not uncommon in the Mediterranean, is about two feet in length, of a blueish lead colour above and pale yellow beneath. There are dark blue spots on the back and dorsal fin, and the under parts of the body are furnished with spots of a paler colour. The ventral fins are yellowish beneath and black above, and the anal fin is yellowish. The greatest depth of the body is about one sixth of the whole length. [Coryphaena hippurus.] There are several other species of this genus, some of which are found in the Mediterranean, and very closely resemble the one just described. The genus Caranxomorus (Lacépède) is closely allied to Coryphaena (proper); the species, however, may be distin guished by their having the head less elevated and the eye in a medial position; the dorsal fin is shallow and of equal height throughout: the tail is much forked. Caranxomorus pelagicus is about nine or ten inches in length, of a blueish colour above and yellowish beneath: the dorsal and anal fins are of the same colour as the back of the fish, and have a whitish margin. It inhabits the Mediterranean. The subgenus Centrolophus has already been noticed under the proper head. We will merely remark that the species of this genus which we have seen have the body shorter in proportion than in either of the two preceding genera, and of a somewhat elongate-oval form, the tail less forked, &c. Subgenus Astrodermus (Bonnelli). But one species of this subgenus is known. The generic characters are: head elevated, mouth but slightly cleft; dorsal fin extending nearly the whole length of the body; ventral fins very small, and placed on the throat; branchiostegous rays four. Astrodermus Coryphanoides (Cuv.) is from twelve to fifteen inches in length, and of a pale rose colour, with five or six longitudinal rows of round black spots; the dorsal and anal fins are blackish, and the pectoral and caudal fins are of a red hue. The most remarkable character of this fish, however, consists in the scales, which, instead of folding over each other in the usual way, are scattered over the body and head; they are very minute and serrated, and, under a lens resemble small stars. It inhabits the Mediterranean. |