INTRODUCTION 6g 



plainer for his successors to see than he himself was able to see it. What 

 remains to add is that the celebrity of its author actually procured for 

 the first portion of his researches notice in England {Ann. Nat. Hist. xvii. 

 p. 499), though it must be confessed not tlien to any practical purpose.^ 



It is now necessary to revert to the year 1842, in which Dr. Cornay 

 of Rochefort communicated to the French Academy of Sciences a memoir 

 on a new Classification of Birds, of which, however, nothing but a notice 

 has been preserved (Comptes Eendus, xiv. p. 164). Two years later this 

 was followed by a second contribution from him on the same subject, and 

 of this only an extract appeared in the official organ of the Academy (op. 

 cit. xvi. pp. 94, 95), though an abstract was inserted in one scientific journal 

 {L'Institut, xii. p. 21), and its first portion in another {Journal des 

 Be'couvertes, i. p. 250). The Revue Zoologique for 1847 (pp. 360-369) 

 contained the whole, and enabled naturalists to consider the merits of the 

 author's project, which was to found a new Classification of Birds on the 

 form of the anterior palatal bones, which he declared to be subjected 

 more evidently than any other to certain fixed laws. These laws, as for- 

 mulated by him, are that (1) there is a coincidence of form of the anterior 

 palatal bones and of the cranium in Birds of the same Order ; (2) there is a 

 likeness between the anterior palatal bones in Birds of the same Order ; (3) 

 there are relations of likeness between the anterior palatal bones in groups 

 of Birds which are near to one another. These laws, he added, exist in 

 regard to all parts that ofi^er characters fit for the methodical arrangement 

 of Birds, but it is in regard to the anterior palatal bones that they un- 

 questionably off'er the most evidence. In the evolution of these laws Dr. 

 Cornay had most laudably studied, as his observations prove, a vast 

 number of difi"erent types, and the upshot of his whole laboi;rs, though 

 not very clearly stated, was such as wholly to subvert the classification at 

 that time generally adopted by French ornithologists. He of course knew 

 the investigations of L'Herminier and De Blainville on sternal formation, 

 and he also seems to have been aware of some pterylological difi^erences 

 exhibited in Birds — whether those disclosed by Nitzsch or those by Jacque 

 min is not stated. True- it is the latter were never published in full, 

 but it is conceivable that Dr. Cornay may have known their drift. Be 

 that as it may, he declares that characters drawn from the sternum or the 

 pelvis — hitherto deemed to be, next to the bones of the head, the most 

 important portions of the bird's framework — are scarcely worth more, from 

 a classificatory point of view, than characters drawn from the bill or the 

 legs ; while pterylological considerations, together with many others to 

 which some systematists had attached more or less importance, can only 

 assist, and apparently must never be taken to control, the force of evi- 

 dence furnished by this bone of all bones — the anterior palatal. 



^ More than 30 years after proper tribute was rendered to one who by his 

 investigations had so iriaterially advanced the study of Ornithology, since in 1878 

 Mr. Sclater procured the publication at Oxford of an English version of this treatise 

 under the title of Johannes Miiller on Certain Variations in the Vocal Organs of the 

 Passeres that have hitherto escaped notice. It was translated by Prof. Jeffrey Bell, 

 and Garrod added an appendix containing a summary of his own continuation of the 

 same line of research. By some unaccountable accident, the date of the original com- 

 munication to the Academy of Berlin is wrongly printed. It is rightly given above. 



