arren arid plains of the river
Colombia; also in the interior of North California. They do not exist on
the banks of the river Missouri; nor have they been seen in any place
east of the Rocky Mountains."

The general colour of the upper plumage is light hair-brown, mottled and
variegated with dark umber-brown and yellowish-white. The under plumage
is white and unspotted on the breast and part of the body; but dark
umber-brown, approaching to black, on the lower hall of the body, and
part of the flanks; the latter towards the vent are marked as on the
upper plumage. The under tail coverts are black, broadly tipped with
white. The feathers of the thighs and tarsi are light hair-brown,
mottled with darker lines. The throat and region of the head is varied
with blackish on a white ground. The shafts of all the feathers on the
breast are black, rigid, and look like hairs; but those of the
scale-like feathers of the sides are white and thicker. The bill and
toes are blackish. The bill is thick and strong: the ridge is advanced
to a remarkable extent towards the front, and divides the thickset
feathers which cover the nostrils by a convex ridge of three quarters of
an inch long. This is a very peculiar and important character, since it
plainly indicates the analogy of this form to _Ramphastos, Buceros_,[5]
and numerous other rasorial types. On each side the breast, the present
specimen exhibits two prominent naked protuberances, as in the female
bust, perfectly destitute of hair or feathers. On each side of these
protuberances, and higher up on the neck, is a tuft of feathers, having
their shafts considerably elongated and naked, gently curved, and tipped
with a pencil of a few black radii; they are placed much behind the
naked protuberances, and do not appear intended to cover them when not
inflated. On the sides of the neck, and across the breast, below the
protuberances, the feathers are particularly short, rigid, and acute,
laying over each other with the same compactness and regularity as the
scales of a fish, excepting that their extremities are not rounded, but
acutely pointed. Lower down the breast these feathers, however, begin to
assume more of the ordinary shape; but the shafts still remain very
thick and rigid, while each is terminated by a slender, naked filament,
hornlike, shining, and somewhat flattened towards the end, where there
are a few obsolete radii. The wings in proportion to the size of the
bird, are ve