xvi INTRODUCTION 



passerine and picarian forms, and proceeding to 

 the pigeons and game birds, passes by easy transi- 

 tion vid the grallatorial birds to the aquatic 

 wild-fowl and sea-fowl, it is nevertheless a scheme 

 which has received the sanction of leading orni- 

 thologists in England, France, and Germany, to 

 say nothing of other nations. The most striking 

 character which distinguishes birds from all other 

 vertebrates (save the Chiroptera) is the power of 

 flight, and since that peculiarity is most highly 

 developed in the Falcons, which are able to overtake 

 and capture the fastest birds upon the wing, not even 

 excepting Swallows and Swifts, it seems not un- 

 reasonable on this account, if for no other, to place 

 the raptorial birds as the highest type of the class 

 Aves at the head of any scheme of classification. So 

 thought Linnaeus and Cuvier, and long before their 

 time so thought Willughby and Ray. This view 

 has been shared by many English writers of the past 

 and present centuries : — Bewick,^ Selby, Jenyns, 

 Eyton, Macgillivray, Jardine, Hancock, Gould, 

 Gurney, Stevenson, Cordeaux, Rodd, Mansell Pley- 

 dell, Borrer, A. C. Smith, and others whose names 

 with ornithologists are " household words," not over- 

 looking the views of Professor Newton as indicated 

 in the fourth edition of Yarrell's well-known work, 



1 Many people are perliajjs unaware that Bewick did not write the 

 letterpress of the work so beautifully illustrated by him, and his views, 

 if he had any, on classification can only be inferred on the assumption 

 that he sanctioned the arrangement of his woodcuts by his coadjutor, 

 Beilbv. 



