HJÖRRING, an ancient town of Denmark, capital of the amt (county) of its name, in the northern insular part of the peninsula of Jutland. Pop. (1901) 7901. It lies 7 m. inland from the shore of Jammer Bay, a stretch of coast notoriously dangerous to shipping. On the coast is Lönstrup, a favoured seaside resort. In this neighbourhood as well as to the south-east of Hjörring, slight elevations are seen, deserving the name of hills in this low-lying district. Hjörring is on the northern railway of Jutland, which here turns eastward to the Cattegat part of Frederikshavn (23 m.), a harbour of refuge.
HKAMTI LÔNG (called Kantigyi by the Burmese, and Bor Hkampti by the peoples on the Assam side), a collection of seven Shan states subordinate to Burma, but at present beyond the administrative border. Estimated area, 900 sq. m.; estimated pop. 11,000. It lies between 27° and 28° N. and 97° and 98° E., and is bordered by the Mishmi country on the N., by the Patkai range on the W., by the Hukawng valley on the S. and E., and indeed all round by various Chingpaw or Kachin communities. The country is little known. It was visited by T. T. Cooper, the Chinese traveller and political agent at Bhamo, where he was murdered; by General Woodthorpe and Colonel Macgregor in 1884, by Mr Errol Grey in the following year, and by Prince Henry of Orleans in 1895. All of these, however, limited their explorations to the valley of the Mali-hka, the western branch of the Irrawaddy river. Hkamti has shrunk very much from its old size. It was no doubt the northernmost province of the Shan kingdom, founded at Mogaung by Sam Lōng-hpa, the brother of the ruler of Kambawsa, when that empire had reached its greatest extension. The irruption of Kachins or Chingpaw from the north has now completely hemmed the state in. Prince Henry of Orleans described it as “a splendid territory, fertile in soil and abundant in water, where tropical and temperate culture flourish side by side, and the inhabitants are protected on three fronts by mountains.” According to him the Kiutze, the people of the hills between the Irrawaddy and the Salween, call it the kingdom of Moam.
HLOTHHERE, king of Kent, succeeded his brother Ecgberht in 673, and appears for a time to have reigned jointly with his nephew Eadric, son of Ecgberht, as a code of laws still extant was issued under both names. Neither is mentioned in the account of the invasion of Æthelred in 676. In 685 Eadric, who seems to have quarrelled with Hlothhere, went into exile and led the South Saxons against him. Hlothhere was defeated and died of his wounds.
See Bede, Hist. eccl. (Plummer), iv. 5, 17, 26, v. 24; Saxon Chronicle (Earle and Plummer), s.a. 685; Schmid, Gesetze, pp. 10 sqq.; Thorpe, Ancient Laws, i. 26 sqq.
HOACTZIN, or Hoatzin, a bird of tropical South America, thought by Buffon to be that indicated by Hernandez or Fernandez under these names, the Opisthocomus hoazin or O. cristatus of modern ornithologists—a very curious and remarkable form, which has long exercised the ingenuity of classifiers. Placed by Buffon among his “Hoccos” (Curassows), and then by P. L. S. Müller and J. F. Gmelin in the Linnaean genus Phasianus, some of its many peculiarities were recognized by J. K. W. Illiger in 1811 as sufficient to establish it as a distinct genus, Opisthocomus; but various positions were assigned to it by subsequent systematic authors. L’Herminier was the first to give any account of its anatomy (Comptes rendus, 1837, v. 433), and from his time our knowledge of it has been successively increased by Johannes Müller (Ber. Akad. Wissensch. Berlin, 1841, p. 177), Deville (Rev. et mag. de zoologie, 1852, p. 217), Gervais (Castelnau, Expéd. Amérique du Sud, zoologie, anatomie, p. 66), Huxley (Proc. Zool. Society, 1868, p. 304), Perrin (Trans. Zool. Society, ix. p. 353), and A. H. Garrod (Proc. Zool. Society, 1879, p. 109). After a minute description of the skeleton of Opisthocomus, with the especial object of determining its affinities, Huxley declared that it “resembles the ordinary gallinaceous birds and pigeons more than it does any others, and that when it diverges from them it is either sui generis or approaches the Musophagidae.” He accordingly regarded it as the type and sole member of a group, named by him Heteromorphae, which sprang from the great Carinate stem later than the Tinamomorphae, Turnicomorphae, or Charadriomorphae, but before the Peristeromorphae, Pteroclomorphae or Alectoromorphae. This conclusion is substantially the same as that at which A. H. Garrod subsequently arrived after closely examining and dissecting specimens preserved in spirit; but the latter has gone further and endeavoured to trace more particularly the descent of this peculiar form and some others, remarking that the ancestor of Opisthocomus must have left the parent stem very shortly before the true Gallinae first appeared, and at about the same time as the independent pedigree of the Cuculidae and Musophagidae commenced—these two groups being, he believed, very closely related, and Opisthocomus serving to fill the gap between them.
The first thing that strikes the observer of its skeleton is the extraordinary structure of the sternal apparatus, which is wholly unlike that of any other bird known. The keel is only developed on the posterior part of the sternum—the fore part being, as it were, cut away, while the short furcula at its symphysis meets the manubrium, with which it is firmly consolidated by means of a prolonged and straight hypocleidium, and anteriorly ossifies with the coracoids. This unique arrangement seems to be correlated with the enormously capacious crop, which rests upon the furcula and fore part of the sternum, and is also received in a cavity formed on the surface of each of the great pectoral muscles. Furthermore this crop is extremely muscular, so as more to resemble a gizzard, and consists of two portions divided by a partial constriction, after a fashion of which no other example is known among birds. The true gizzard is greatly reduced.
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