204 REPORT — 1844. 



lence of the drawings of Gould and of Swainson, which should not be over- 

 looked. It is, that these artists have in almost every case (when the living 

 bird was not accessible) made their designs from dried skins, and not from 

 mounted specimens. In the skin of a bird, dried in the usual mode for con- 

 venience of carriage, the natural outlines and attitudes are nearly obliterated, 

 and the artist is consequently compelled to study living examples, to retain 

 the images thus acquired in his memory, and to transfer them to his design. 

 By the constant habit of thus re-animating as it were these lifeless and shape- 

 less corpses, he acquires a freedom of outline and a variety of attitude unat- 

 tainable by any other means. But when an artist attempts to draw from a 

 stuffed specimen, he beholds only a fabric of wire and tow, too often a mere 

 caricature of nature, exhibiting only the caprices and mannerisms of an igno- 

 rant bird-stuffer. Knowing that the object before him is intended to represent 

 nature, he is unconsciously and irresistibly led to copy it with all its deformi- 

 ties. Such is no doubt one cause of the stiff and lifeless designs which we 

 see in the French works, drawn as they mostly are from mounted specimens 

 in the Paris Museums. 



6. Anatomy and Physiology of Birds. 



The most complete general treatise on the anatomy of birds that 1 am ac- 

 quainted with is the article Aves by Prof. Owen, in Todd's ' Cyclopaedia of 

 Anatomy and Physiology.' The author's original investigations on this sub- 

 ject are here combined with those of others, and the whole forms an excellent 

 monograph of the structural peculiarities of the class, as well as of many dif- 

 ferential modifications which mark particular groups. Much indeed remains 

 to be added to our knowledge of individual organizations, but those anatomi- 

 cal arrangements which distinguish Birds from the other classes of Vertebrata 

 can hardly be described with greater precision or reasoned upon more philoso- 

 phically than in the work in question. We may indeed regret that this treatise 

 of Prof. Owen is not published in a separate and more accessible form, espe- 

 cially if we consider how essential a knowledge of comparative anatomy is to 

 the scientific zoologist, and what peculiar interest attaches to the anatomy of 

 Birds, as indicating their affinities to Reptiles and to Mammals, and as ex- 

 hibiting the wonderful arrangements by which their muscular bodies are sus- 

 tained in a medium at least one thousand times lighter than themselves. We 

 shall however be soon put in possession of Prof. Owen's most recent re- 

 searches on the anatomy of birds, by the publication of that portion of his 

 ' Hunterian Lectures ' which relates to the Vertebrata, and which will 

 doubtless be of equal value with the excellent volume already issued on the 

 Jnvertebrata. 



Another carefully-prepared summary of ornithic anatomy is that by Prof. 

 M'Gillivray, in the Introduction to his ' History of British Birds.' The au- 

 thor has evidently bestowed much labour, both mental and manual, upon this 

 subject, and has successfully vindicated the claims of comparative anatomy 

 to be considered not an adjunct to, but a part of, scientific zoology. The 

 above work is particularly valuable for its details respecting the organs of 

 digestion, a part of the system to which the author justly attributes great im- 

 portance, and which he has treated of in a special article in the ' Magazine 

 of Zoology and Botany,' vol. i. Resumes of the anatomical peculiarities of 

 birds will also be found in the ' Elemens de Zoologie,' by Milne Edwards, 

 1837, and in the ' Encyclopaedia Britannica' and ' Penny Cyclopasdia.' The 

 article Zoology in the 'Encyclopaedia Metropolitana ' also contains a useful 

 treatise on the subject, though it is damaged by the affectation of using new 

 English terms in place of the received Latin terminology of anatomy. 



