The range of the Family is nearly cosmopolitan; but the Meleagrinae only occur in the United States and Central America; the Numidinae in Africa, with Madagascar and the neighbouring islands; and the Phasianinae in the Palaearctic and Indian Regions as far eastward as the Philippines, China and Japan, and–in the case of _Gallus_–Celebes. The Perdicinae are found in the Palaearctic, Indian and Australian Regions, though becoming decidedly scarce in Oceania; the Odontophorinae occupy temperate and tropical America to Bolivia and Brazil southwards; while the Tetraoninae are holarctic, the New World genera being more numerous than those of the Old World, and _Lagopus_ alone being common to both hemispheres. Sub-fam. 1. _Numidinae._–Of the curious-looking Guinea-fowls, or Pintados, _Acryllium vulturinum_ of East Africa has a long, wedge-shaped tail, and elongated hackles on the mantle, chest, and lower neck; the upper neck and head being naked and blue, with a crescentic nuchal band of short chestnut feathers, and each metatarsus possessing four or five knobs in the male. The hackles are black and white, mostly fringed with blue; the remaining upper parts and the flanks are black spotted with white, having a purple wash on the latter; the breast and belly are cobalt, marked with black centrally. _Guttera_ contains four black species with light blue spots, which show much white on the secondaries. A full and usually curly black crest adorns the crown; the bare head and neck, with its posterior flap of skin, is blue or purplish, and the throat is red, except in _G. pucherani_ of East Equatorial Africa, where the hind-neck only is blue, and _G. eduardi_ (_verreauxi_) of South Africa, with no bright colours on the head, neck, or throat. The latter, and _G. cristata_ of northern West Africa, have rudimentary blue wattles at the gape, coupled with a black collar, which in _G. eduardi_ extends to the breast and assumes a chestnut shade. _G. plumifera_, ranging from Cape Lopez to Loango, has larger wattles and a thin erect crest; _G. pucherani_ has the outgrowths red. This genus and the next have no spurs. _Numida_, remarkable for the bony casque surmounting the naked head and neck, possesses seven or more members of clumsy build, with {205}white spots on the black plumage. _N. meleagris_ of West Africa and several of its islands, introduced in Ascension and the Greater Antilles, which is the origin of our present domestic stock, has the broad gape-wattles and bare tracts red, save for a blue hind-neck; the small conical helmet is yellowish, and a wide grey ring divides the neck from the body. _N. coronata_ of eastern South Africa, _N. reichenowi_ of East Africa, _N. cornuta_ of western South Africa, _N. marungensis_, found from Benguela to Tanganyika, _N. mitrata_ of East Africa, Madagascar, and the islands in the vicinity, and _N. ptilorhyncha_ of North-East Africa, lack the collar and differ from each other in the shape of the large helmet,