(U Annals of the Carnegie Museum. 



bone is concave longitudinally for its entire length on the anterior as- 

 pect, and less so upon the posterior. The trochlear prolongations at 

 the distal end are large, and the extremity much expanded, a feature 

 still better marked in the swift-footed Oyster-catchers. When describ- 

 ing the skeleton in the Plovers I spoke of the fact of a number of the 

 limicoline birds lacking the hind toes. This is the case with Himan- 

 topiis and others. With respect to the Curlews, in number, the pha- 

 langes of the podal digits are arranged upon the common plan of the 

 avian foot, and in no way offer us anything beyond the ornithic char- 

 acteristics that pertain to the skeletal foot of a typical wader. 



Now the writer has made many comparisons of the wing and leg bones 

 of the Limicohv, and has failed to find any very decided departures 

 from what has been given above for the Curlews. Practically, the 

 characters are the .same throughout the suborder. Even those birds 

 that show the more marked differences in other directions, as the 

 Woodcocks and Gallinago, have the skeleton of the limbs typically 

 limicoline. This does not apply to the comparative and relative 

 lengths and calibers of bones, for such may differ, and probably do, 

 among the various species and genera of shore -birds. Nor does the 

 absence or presence of the claw on the pollex phalanx seem to go for 

 much, for although entirely wanting in some forms, it is most rudi- 

 mentary in others, while as we have seen, in N'liineniiis it is a true 

 claw, piercing the integuments and covered with a horny sheath. 

 Such a claw never occurs, I believe, on the distal phalanx of index 

 digit in any of the Li/iiiiohe. . 



In so far as the osteology of the AplirizidiR is concerned I have 

 already given a full account of the skeleton of the Surf Bird in a paper 

 entitled, " On the Affinities of Apliriza virgafa,''' which ap])eared in 

 The Journal of Morphology for November, 1888 (Vol. II., No. 2), and 

 to it the reader is referred for such limicoline characters that are desir- 

 able to be taken into consideration with what is set forth in the present 

 memoir. There are some few corrections the writer would like to 

 make in the aforesaid paper, but they are not of sufficient importance 

 to justify its republication as a whole. There is, however, one point I 

 should like to invite attention to, and that is what I say in that paper 

 in regard to the unreliability of the so-called notches in the sterna of 

 some genera of l>irds. As a character it attracted the attention of Pro- 

 fessor Alfred Newton, F.R.S., and he wrote me from Cambridge, Eng- 

 land, under date of December 14, 1889, and said in connection with 



