328 Prof. J. lieinhardt on the 



his catalogue by the same names as they are described in the 

 treatise. The toe-bone alone was not entered in the cata- 

 logue nor found in the collection. But it does not, so far as 

 I can judgCj seem probaljle that Lund should have numbered 

 and registered all the other remains of birds mentioned in 

 the treatise^ and in some cases less important, while at the 

 same time he omitted to do this with regard to one of the 

 most important, if he had really possessed it when writing 

 the catalogue of his collection. I think, therefore, that this 

 brittle and fragile bone (to judge from the existing drawings) 

 must have disappeared while Lund was in Brazil, whether he 

 lost it or whether, perhaps more probably, it fell to pieces. 

 This loss is of course to be regretted ; but in my opinion it is 

 not of very great importance, as the two above-mentioned 

 drawings, which are preserved, are sufficient to give a fairly 

 good idea of it. 



Illiger himself saw and examined only two out of the six 

 genera of birds which he placed together in his family 

 Alectorides^ ; he knew the rest only from the not very 

 satisfactory descriptions and illustrations of that time ; and 

 it is therefore easy to understand that his Alectorides became 

 a somewhat promiscuous assemblage of dissimilar birds. 

 Nor Avas Temminck-'s knowledge of them extensive; and 

 even after removing from them the very divergent Cereopsis, 

 the family did not become a natural group, and it has 

 accordingly now been wholly abandoned. Nor did Lund 

 himself know much of it. Of the three forms which were 

 left longest in the group Alectorides, two — Palamedea and 

 the Trumpeters — have not their home in those parts of South 

 America in which he lived and worked ; and the skeleton and 

 internal structure of the former in particular were, at the time 

 he wrote, very insufficiently or not at all known. The only 

 one, therefore, which he knew accurately, and with the bones 

 of which he could compare the few fossil remains which he 

 thought belonged to a gigantic Alectorid, was the Cariama, 

 which occurs in great numbers in the Brazilian campos — nay, 



* That some oruithologists still use the name Alectorides, but in a diiFe- 

 rent sense from Illiger's, need not be further uieutioned. 



