Euplocamus cuvieri, Temmincfa
Vernacular Names.—[Rat, Araam ; Yit (Burmese) Aracm\
T has been customary to consider this species a
hybrid, between the Eastern Kalij and the Vermicellated
Pheasant.
That it is an intermediate form between these two,
and in many respects resembles both, may be freely
conceded, but the term hybrid cannot, with any
propriety of language, be applied to a permanent
species, the sole inhabitant of its class of a vast tract of country
in which neither of the species occurs of which it is alleged
to be a hybrid.
By hybrids we understand, when speaking of wild animals,
a form, the offspring of two parents of different species, not
a persistent race occupying a large tract of country, in which
parents and offspring are all precisely alike.
It may be that both present many features in common with
two other species, but this affords no support for the unscientific
theory of inter-breeding or hybridism which has been so
constantly put forward in cases like the present.
The true explanation of the cases which this theory is meant
to explain is simply this : If, in one region A, we find one
form a, and in a neighbouring region B, we find a nearly allied
form b, and somewhere between the two regions, A and B, or
where they inosculate, we find a third form, which we will call
c, intermediate between a and b, then this form is clearly due, I
submit, not to the inter-breeding of a and b, but to the fact that
the physical conditions of existence, which in A determined
the form a, and in B the form b, arc at the confines of these
regions intermediate in character, and have, therefore, given
rise to form c intermediate between a and b.
In this present case, the alleged hybrid is, so far as we
know, the sole Pheasant of the class occurring for a length
of fully 300 miles in the Aracan Hills. Whether it occurs
outside these hills and the forests at their bases, is uncertain.
In British Burma it is replaced directly we descend to the
valley of the Irrawaddy by E, lineatus, but it may extend into