No. I.] THE CRANIUM IN THE OWLS. l6l 



Vomer is present, but is very slender ; in subadult individ- 

 uals it is probably unossified (that is, hudagtigt, or skin-like). 



The maxillo-palatines are, mesially, almost in contact upon 

 their inferior side. 



[Conclusion of the translation.] 



Opinions upon the Position of the Strigidce in the System. 



Huxley, in his celebrated paper " On the Classification of 

 Birds," published in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society 

 of London in 1867, says that his Aetomorphae is a division 

 which is equivalent " to the ' Raptores ' of Cuvier — an emi- 

 nently natural assemblage, and yet one the members of which, 

 as the preceding enumeration of their characters shows,^ vary 

 in most important particulars." 



" They appear to me to fall naturally into four well-defined 

 primary groups — the Strigidce, the CatJiartidce, the GypcetidcB, 

 and the GypogeranidcB. But this arrangement is so different 

 from that ordinarily adopted that I shall proceed to justify 

 it by enumerating the principal circumstances in which the 

 members of the several divisions agree with one another and 

 differ from the rest." 



This is first followed by a fairly complete resume of the 

 osteological and other characters of the owls ; but as many 

 important skeletal strigine characters have, since that paper 

 was published, been described by ornithotomists, I will com- 

 plete Professor Huxley's opinion by what he thought of the 

 systematic position of the Caprimnlgidce, which he believed 

 "come near Trogon, and more remotely approach Podargus 

 and the Owls " (p. 469). 



This is important, for as early as 1867 so keen an observer 

 as Huxley saw the affinity between the goat-suckers and the 

 owls. In his admirable article " Ornithology," in the ninth 

 edition of the Encyclopcedia Britannica (Vol. XVHI, p. 47), Pro- 

 fessor Newton says that " it has so long been the custom to 



^ It has not been thought necessary to give these characters here ; they are 

 surely not of a nature to convince one that a typical hawk, an American vulture, 

 and an owl all belong to the same group; for example, Accipiter •\- Cathartes 

 4- Strix ! _ R. W. S. 



