178 REPORT — 1844, 



family Alcedinidre arranged upon this principle (Annals of Nat. Hist. vol. vi. 

 p. 184<). Last year I extended it to the Inxessores, and I have brought to 

 the present meeting a sketch of the whole class of birds exhibited by the 

 same method. I do not of course guarantee the accuracy of any part of the 

 arrangement in its present state, as the subject is too vast to be perfected by 

 a single individual ; but the specimen now shown may nevertheless serve to 

 illustrate a method which I believe to be sound in principle, and which I 

 ■would gladly see tested in other departments of organic creation *. 



M. de Selys Longchamps, in the Appendix to his ' Faune Beige,' 1842, 

 has given a sketch of an ornithological system, in which the order of succes- 

 sion differs little from that generally adopted. He divides the class into 

 eleven orders, some of which, as the Inertes, Chelidones, Alectorides, and 

 Struthiones, can hardly be said to be of equal rank with the rest. He adopts 

 the plan proposed by Nitzsch, and followed by Keyserling and Blasius, of 

 including with the zygodactyle Scansores several other groups allied to them 

 in many points of structure, and differing from the remaining Insessores in 

 having the paratarsus scutate instead of entire. It is doubtful how far this 

 last character affords a good ground for the diagnosis of orders, and it may 

 be objected that by adhering to this distinction we separate the TrochilidcB 

 from the Nectariniidce, Pht/tototna from the TanagridcE, and Menura from 

 Turdidce. On the other hand, this arrangement has the advantage of bring- 

 ing into juxtaposition the unquestionably allied groups of AlcedinidcB and 

 Galbulida, as well as the BucerotidcB and RhamphastidcR. The scutation of 

 the paratarsus, therefore, may form a useful auxiliary to natural classifica- 

 tion, although, if too rigidly adhered to, it would produce in some cases an 

 artificial arrangement. 



Few more valuable contributions have been made of late years to general 

 ornithology than Mr. G. R. Gray's ' Genera of Birds,' which passed through 

 two editions in 1840 and 1841. It is a list of all the generic groups which 

 had been proposed by various authors, exemplified by reference to a type- 

 species in each case, and classed according to Mr. Gray's ideas of the natural 

 system. This work is deserving of praise on several distinct grounds. The 

 author has exercised a rare degree of industry in collecting his materials 

 from numerous sources difficult of access ; he has applied the " law of prio- 

 rity" in nomenclature with great fairness and impartiality, and he has sought 

 after a natural arrangement without any theoretical bias, and with very con- 

 siderable success. Although professedly including in his list every genus 

 proposed by others, yet he does not pledge himself to adopt them all, indeed 

 he distinctly asserts that many so-called genera are too trivial for practical 

 ■utility. With this limitation, the ' Genera of Birds' is by far the best manual 

 extant for the purpose of arranging collections scientifically, and of guiding 

 the student to more hidden and scattered sources of information. 



In a compilation of such a nature as Mr. Gray's many errors of detail are 

 unavoidable, and being sensible of the general value of the work, I ventured 

 to point out some of them in a series of commentaries upon the two editions 

 of the ' Genera of Birds,' which will be found in the ' Annals of Natural 



* Mr. Wateihouse communicated to the Cork meeting of the Association an arrangement 

 of Mammalia -wliich is on very nearly the same principle as that above referred to. His 

 groups are all drawn as circular, of equal size, and placed in contact, whereas in my map 

 of birds the groups of the same rank are of irregular form and dimensions, and are placed 

 at greater or less distances according to the amount of their affinities. I beUeve, however, 

 that Mr. Waterhouse does not lay any stress on these points of difference, and that his 

 method is in fact reducible almost to an identity with mine. A somewhat similar mode of 

 exhibiting affinities by diagrams has also been recently adopted by Milne Edwards (Ann. 

 Sc. Nat. 1344), De Selys Longchamps, and others. 



