INTRODUCTION js 



the general structure than those furnished by the carotid artery only. 

 Among all the species (188, he tells us, in number) of which he examined 

 specimens, he found only four variations in the structure of that vessel , 

 but so much has since been done in this way that there is no need to 

 dwell on his particular researches, and the reader may be referred to Dr. 

 Gadow's article in the text of this work (pp. 76, 77). 



Considering the enormous stride in advance made by L'Herminier, it 

 is very disappointing for the historian to have to record that the next 

 inquirer into the osteology of Birds achieved a disastrous failure in his 

 attempt to throw light on their arrangement by means of a comparison of 

 their sternum. This was Berthold, who devoted a long chapter of his 

 Beitrage zur Anatomie, published at Gottingen in 1831, to a consideration 

 of the subject. So far as his introductory chapter went — the development 

 of the sternum — he was, for his time, right enough and somewhat 

 instructive. It was only when, after a close examination of the sternal 

 apparatus of 130 species, which he carefully described, that he arrived 

 (pp. 177-183) at the conclusion — astonishing to us who know of L'Her- 

 minier's previous results — that the sternum of Birds cannot be used as a 

 help to their classification on account of the egregious anomalies that 

 would follow the proceeding — such anomalies, for instance, as the 

 separation of Gypselus from Hirundo and its alliance with Trochilus, and 

 the grouping of Hirundo and Fringilla together. He seems to have 

 been persuaded that the method of Linnaeus and his disciples was 

 indisputably right, and that any method which contradicted it must 

 therefore be wrong. Moreover, he appears to have regarded the sternal 

 structure as a mere function of the Bird's habit, especially in regard to 

 its power of flight, and to have wholly overlooked the converse position 

 that this power of flight must depend entirely on the structure. Good 

 descriptive anatomist as he certainly was, he was false to the anatomist's 

 creed ; but it is plain, from reading his careful descriptions of sternums, 

 that he could not grasp the essential characters he had before him, and, 

 attracted only by the more salient and obvious features, had not capacity 

 to interpret the meaning of the whole. Yet he did not amiss by giving 

 many figures of sternums hitherto unrepresented. We pass from him to 

 a more lively theme. 



At the very beginning of the year 1832 Cuvier laid before the 

 Academy of Sciences of Paris a memoir on the progress of ossification in 

 the sternum of Birds, of which memoir an abstract will be found in the 

 Annales des Sciences Naturelles (xxv. pp. 260-272). Herein he treated 

 of several subjects with which we are not particularly concerned at 

 present, and his remarks throughout were chiefly directed against certain 

 theories Avhich Etienne Geoff"roy St.-Hilaire had propounded in his 

 Philosophie Anatomique, published a good many years before, and need 

 not trouble lis here ; but what does signify to us now is that Cuvier 

 traced in detail, illustrating his statements by the preparations he 

 exhibited, the progress of ossification in the sternum of the Fowl and of 

 the Duck, pointing out how it difi'ered in each, and giving his inter- 

 pretation of the difl^erences. It had hitherto been generally believed 

 that the mode of ossification in the Fowl was that which obtained in all 



