III. OSTEOLOGY OF 'I'Hl-: IIMICOL.'?^. 



V,\ Dr. R. \y. Shufeldt. 



In I'KoDucriON. 

 Two or three years ago I gathered together into one memoir a num- 

 ber of papers I had published on the limicoline birds since 1883, 

 digesting, as well as augmenting, the material thus collected. Subse- 

 quently I Avent over this entire MS. again, improving it in many ways 

 and adding many new facts, which I had obtained as a result of my 

 studies of more extended series of skeletons of this group. Finally, at 

 the present writing, that is the last part of September, 1902, the entire 

 monograph has been carefully gone over again, and largely remodeled, 

 and this entailed a copying of many pages of the work — a task cheer- 

 fully performed for me by my wife Alf hild, to whom my thanks are 

 due. As the paper now stands, it is probably the most extensive con- 

 tribution to the osteology and taxonomy of the Limicolcp. that has 

 appeared from the pen of any writer on the subject up to the present 

 time. With this brief prefatory history I pass at once to the consider- 

 ation of the results of my researches in the osteology of the forms con- 

 tained in this sul)order. 



Ox THE Osteology of the Limicoline Birds, with Views Upon 

 Their Classification. 



It was Professor Alfred Newton who said under the article " Plover " 

 in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Vol. XIX., p. 

 228) that "Though the various forms here spoken of as Plovers are 

 almost certainly closely allied, they must be regarded as constituting a 

 very indefinite group, for hardly any strong line of demarcation can be 

 drawn between them and the Sandpipers and Snipes. United, how- 

 ever, with both of the latter, under the name Limicohv, after the method 

 approved by the most recent systematists, the whole form an assem- 

 blage, the compactness of which no observant ornithologist can hesitate 

 to admit, even if he be not inclined to treat as its nearest relations the 

 Bustards on the one hand and the Gavice on the other, as before sug- 

 gested." This is ([uitc in harmony with my own views in the ])remises, 



15 



