68 DICTION AR V OF BIRDS 



his first and second " Tribes " ; but the third is an assemblage still more 

 heterogeneous than that which Nitzsch brought together under a name so 

 like that of Miiller — for the fact must nevei' be allowed to go out of 

 sight that the extent of the Picarii of the latter is not at all that of the 

 Picariae. of the former.^ For instance, Miiller places in his third " Tribe " 

 the group which he called Ampelidm, meaning thereby the peculiar forms 

 of South America that are now considered to be more properly named 

 Cotingidse (Chatterer), and herein he was clearly right, while Nitzsch, 

 who, misled by their supposed affinity to the genus Ampelis (Waxwing) — 

 peculiar to the Northern Hemisphere, and a purely Passerine form, had 

 kept them among his Passerinse, was as clearly wrong. But again Miiller 

 made his third " Tribe " Picarii also to contain the Tyrannidse, of which 

 mention has just been made, though it is so obvious as now to be 

 generally admitted that they have no very intimate relationship to the 

 other Families with which they are there associated. There is no need here 

 to criticize more minutely his projected arrangement, and it must be said 

 that, notwithstanding his researches, he seems to have had some mis- 

 givings that, after all, the separation of the Insessores into those " Tribes " 

 might not be justifiable. At any rate he wavered in his estimate of their 

 taxonomic value, for he gave an alternative proposal, arranging all the 

 genera in a single series, a proceeding in those days thought not only 

 defensible and possible, but desirable or even requisite, though now 

 utterly abandoned. Just as Nitzsch had laboured under the disadvantage 

 of never having any example of the abnormal Passeres of the New World 

 to dissect, and therefore was wholly ignorant of their abnormality, so 

 Miiller never succeeded in getting hold of an example of the genus Pitta 

 for the same purpose, and yet, acting on the clew furnished by Keyserling 

 and Blasius, he did not hesitate to predict that it would be found to fill 

 one of the gaps he had to leave, and this to some extent it has been since 

 proved to do. The result of all this is that the Oscines or true Passeres 

 are found to be a group in which the vocal organs not only attain the 

 greatest perfection, but are nearly if not quite as uniform in their structure 

 as in the sternal apparatus ; while at the same time each set of characters 

 is wholly unlike that which exists in any other group of Birds, as is set 

 forth in Dr. Gadow's article Syrinx in the text. 



It must not be supposed that the muscles just defined were first dis- 

 covered by Miiller ; on the contrary they had been described long before, 

 and by many writers on the anatomy of Birds. To say nothing of 

 foreigners, or the authors of general works on the subject, an excellent 

 account of them had been given by Yarrell in 1829 {Trans. Linn. Soc. 

 xvi. pp. 305-321, pis. 17, 18), an abstract of which was subsequently 

 given in the article "Raven" in his History of British Birds, and Mac- 

 gillivray also described and figured them with the greatest accuracy ten 

 years later in his work with the same title (ii. pp. 21-37, pis. x.-xii.), 

 while Blyth and Nitzsch had (as already mentioned) seen some of their 

 value in classification. But Miiller has the merit of clearly outstriding 

 his predecessors, and with his accustomed perspicacity made the way even 



^ It is not needless to point out this fine distinction, for more tlian one modem 

 author would seem to have overlooked it. 



