NO. II CLASSIFICATION, BIRDS OF THE WORLD WETMORE 21 



union of part of the honeycreepers and the wood warblers in one 

 family, the tanagers, with part of the coerebine assemblage with some 

 of the fringillids in the Fringillidae, and removal of the cardueline 

 finches to the Ploceidae, placing that family at the end of his list. His 

 detailed studies afford much valuable information. I agree with him 

 that shifting of certain genera to families in which they are not classi- 

 fied at present will lead to better alignment, but I am not prepared 

 from present information to completely dismember the Coerebidae 

 without further study. Coereba, for example, has a stomach peculiar 

 in its small size; Diglossa differs in the form of the bill, in which 

 the gonys is extended posteriorly behind the level of the nostril, so 

 that it differs from all other oscinine species, to cite only two easily 

 seen characters. 



Mayr and Greenway (1956, pp. 2-5, 8-9) discuss problems of 

 sequence in some detail and cite the approval of a committee appointed 

 at the International Ornithological Congress held in Basel in 1954 to 

 allocation of the Corvidae at the higher end of the list, as has been 

 long customary among most ornithologists of Europe. In further 

 consideration of these matters, I published a note on the humerus of 

 the Corvidae (Wetmore, 1957, pp. 207-209), which called attention 

 particularly to the proximal end of the bone, where the pneumatic 

 fossa in Corvus, for example, has a form not only generally similar to 

 that of the New World flycatchers and their allies, which are recog- 

 nized as low down in the linear classification, but also to the wood- 

 peckers, the Coraciiformes, and the trogons. There is transition 

 from this simpler form to the style found in such groups as the 

 Icteridae, Thraupidae, and Fringillidae, where the fossa is enlarged, 

 and is more complex, as it is partly divided by a bladelike process pro- 

 jecting from the internal tuberosity. (In the paper cited I neglected 

 to refer to an earlier study by James T. Ashley [1941] on the humerus 

 of the Corvidae, which outlined the same differences, and on which 

 Ashley considered the crow group to have more primitive status.) 



Amadon (1957) recently has outlined the three major groups of 

 oscinine families, with the conclusion that the one most highly ad- 

 vanced includes the 9-primaried New World groups, while the section 

 containing the crows is placed low at the beginning. There is general 

 agreement with this in the classification outlined by Delacour and 

 Vaurie (1957). 



Storer (1959) in a clearly stated summary of these recent contri- 

 butions, in which he includes a more recent statement by Mayr ( 1958), 

 writes that in a classification for a text on the biology of birds now in 

 preparation he has placed the 9-primaried groups in the highest place, 



