CHA PAM Rs Vall 
NEORNITHES CARINATAE CONCLUDED 
BRIGADE II—LEGION II (CORACIOMORPHAE CONCLUDED) 
ORDER : PASSERIFORMES 
Order XIV. PASSERIFORMES. 
Tuts Order contains about five thousand five hundred species, 
being more than half the birds yet known. Their classification is 
attended with much difficulty, and the anatomy of many more 
forms must be investigated before anything approaching a satis- 
factory—not to say final—scheme can be proposed. The earlier 
taxonomers often based their systems largely on European genera, 
and were therefore obliged to interpose others, or even to recognise 
new Families, as their knowledge extended, among the many new 
discoveries, to various American and Australian forms. 
The foundation of recent arrangements of the group, depending 
on the number or position of the song-muscles, was laid between 
1845 and 1847 by Johannes Miiller, who divided the then 
generally accepted Order Jnsessores into three tribes: (1) Osernes 
or Polymyodi [Song-birds, or those with many (usually five or seven) 
pairs of song-muscles]; (2) 7racheophones [where the bronchi take 
no part. in the formation of the voice-organ]; and (3) Picari 
[corresponding in the main to Nitzsch’s Picariae]; the two former of 
which included most of the Passerine forms. Simultaneously with 
Miiller, Cabanis proposed a system grounded on similar principles; 
while in 1867 Huxley recognised of his group Coracomorphae the 
divisions Polymyodae, Tracheophonae, and Oligomyodae [birds 
with few song-muscles]. About ten years later Garrod, who was 
followed between 1880 and 1882 by W. A. Forbes, divided the 
Passeres into Desmodactyli, with a band joining the muscles of the 
