300 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, 1890. 



NOTES ON OATES' BIRDS OF INDIA. 

 Part II. 



The interest in Mr. Oates's work will be felt beyond the limits of the Avi- 

 fauna on which he writes, for he has put forward some new and original notions 

 for the classification of the Passerine birds, a subject which will attract the atten- 

 tion of Ornithologists all over the globe. Of this new attempt to re-arrange the 

 Passerine birds, we feel very much as we have felt with regard to all similar 

 attempts of the last twenty years. Each one leans too much on a single character, 

 but each adds something in the way of a brick or two of information towards the 

 building up of a natural classification of Passeres. We are beginning to doubt, 

 however, whether we shall ever arrive at a really natural classification, and certainly 

 we shall not get a linear one. There seems to have been too much endeavour 

 to thrust odd genera into families, in an attempt to make them fit in somewhere, 

 and we shall really only be able to generalise when we know everything about all 

 the leading genera, external contour, osteology, myology, nesting habits, colour of 

 eggs, &c. No character can be considered too unimportant, all must be weighed, 

 and then we may hope that, by a combination of knowledge on every minute point, 

 we may arrive at some satisfactory conclusion. Nomenclature now troubles the 

 ornithological world much less than classification, and it is time that a detailed 

 scheme was prepared for submission to a competent international committee, and 

 discussed at a Zoological Congress. The imprimatur which is given by the annual 

 meetings of the American Ornithologists' Union to the status of various species 

 in the list of North American birds is an admirable institution, and a committee of 

 the B.O.U. might do useful work in the same way. 



The question now arising is, whether systematists are not walking in a wrong 

 direction, when they feel bound to place their genera in some well-known family ; 

 as, for instance, Mr. Oates has done in the present volume with Zosterops. The 

 liability to do this is sure to be stronger when the writer is dealing with the birds 

 of one region only. Zosterops, as represented in the Indian region, only exhibits 

 a paltry five species out of the eighty of which the genus is composed. Then, again, 

 has not too much stress been placed on single characters, such as the number of 

 primary quills, the shape of the wing, &c? The concave Timeliine shape of the 

 wing, which led Mr. Seebohm to discard Cisticola from the Warblers, is reckoned 

 of little worth by Mr. Oates when the spring moult is found to be common to both 

 groups of birds. Not that we are disposed to quarrel with either of these views : 

 they are merely part of the grouping in which we are all engaged towards the 

 accomplishment of a natural system ; but let us see what result follows from the 

 adoption of Mr. Oates's characters. First of all he recognises the two great groups, 

 Acromyodi and Mesomyodi. With this we are most of us agreed. Then he sepa- 

 rates off the Larks on account of their scutellated planta tarsi, a striking character, 

 and the Diceidoe follow on account of the serrations in the tomia. Then the nine- 

 priuoaried birds go on one side — Hirundinidm or Swallows, Fringillidm or Finches, 

 and MotacillidiB or Wagtails and Pipits. Of the ten primaried Passeres, the Sun- 



