ORNITHOLOU V 



23 



Cuvier 



and 



Geoffroy 



hia time, right enough and somewhat instructive. It wa 

 when, after a close examination of the sterna] apparatus of one 

 hundred and thirty species, which lie carefully described, that he 



arrived (pp. 177-183) at thee lusion— astonishing to us who know 



of L'Herminier's previous results— that the sternum of Birds cannol 

 1'.' used as a help to their classification mi account of the egregious 



anomalies that would follow the proc ling such anomalies, for 



instance, as the separation of Cypst lus from Hirundo and its alliance 

 with Trwhilus, and the grouping of Hirundo and / 

 t igether. He seems to have been persuaded that the method of 

 Linna-us ami his disciples was indisputably right, and that any 

 method which contradicted it must therefore lie wrong. Moreover, 

 he appears to have regarded the sternal structure asa mere function 

 of the Bird's habit, especially in regard to its power of flight, and 

 t'i have wholly overlooked tie- converse position that this power of 

 flight must depend entirely on the structure. (...,..1 descriptive 

 anatomist as he certainly was, he was false to the anatomist's creed; 

 lint it is plain, from reading his careful descriptions of sternums, 

 that he could not grasp the essential characters he had before him, 

 and, attracted only by the mure salient and obvious features, had 

 not capacity to interpret the meaning of the whole. Vet he did not 

 amiss by giving many figures of sternums hitherto unrepresented. 

 We pass from him to a more lively theme. 



At the very beginning of the year 1832 Cuvier laid 

 before the Academy of Science, of Paris a memoir on the 

 progress of ossification in the sternum of Birds, of which 

 memoir an abstract will be found in the Annates des 

 Sciences Naturelles (xxv. pp. 200-272). Herein he treated 

 of several subjects with which we are not particularly con- 

 cerned at present, and his remarks throughout were chiefly 

 directed against certain theories which Etienne Geoffroy 

 St-Hilaire had propounded in his Philosophie Anatomique, 

 published a good many years before, and need not trouble us 

 here ; but what does signify to us now is that Cuvier traced 

 in detail, illustrating his statements by the preparations 

 lie exhibited, the progress of ossification in the sternum of 

 tin Fowl and of the Duck, pointing out how it differed 

 in each, and giving his interpretation of the differ- 

 ences. It had hitherto been generally believed that 

 the mode of ossification in the Fowl was that which 

 obtained in all Birds — the Ostrich and its allies (as 

 L'Herminier, we have seen, had already shewn) excepted. 

 But it was now made to appear that the Struthi- 

 ous Birds in this respect resembled, not only the Duck, 

 but a great many other groups — Waders, Birds-of-Prey, 

 Pig s, Passerines, and perhaps all Birds not Galli- 

 naceous, — so that, according to Cuvier's view, the five 

 [mints of ossification observed in the Gallinss, instead 

 "f exhibiting the normal process, exhibited one quite 

 exceptional, and that in all other Birds, so far as he had 



en enabled to investigate the matter, ossification of the 

 sternum began at two points only, situated near the 

 anterior upper margin of the side of the sternum, and 

 gradually crept towards the keel, into which it presently 

 extended ; and, though he allowed the appearance of 

 detached portions of calcareous matter at the base of the 

 still cartilaginous keel in 1 )ucks at a certain age, he seemed 

 to consider this an individual peculiarity. This fact was 

 fa tened upon by Geoffroy in his reply, which was a week 

 later presented to the Academy, but was not published 

 in full until the following year, when it appeared in the 

 Annales <hi Museum (ser. 3, ii. pp. 1-22). Geoffroy here 

 maintained that the five centres of ossification existed in 

 the Duck just as in the Fowl, and that the real difference 

 of the process lay in the period at which they made their 

 appearance, a circumstance, which, though virtually proved 

 by the preparations Cuvier had used, had been by him 

 overlooked or misinterpreted. The Fowl possesses nil 

 five ossifications at birth, and for a long while the middle 

 piece forming the keel is by far the largest. They all 

 grow slowly, and it is not until the animal is about six 



) ili j old that they are united into one firm bone. The 



J 'uck on the other hand, when newly hatched, and for 

 nearly a month after, has the sternum wholly cartilaginous. 



Then, it is true, two lateral points of ossification appear 

 at tic margin, but subsequently the remaining three are 

 developed, and when once formed they grow with much 

 greater rapidity than in the Fowl, so that by tin time the 

 young Duck is quite independent of its parents, and can 

 shift for itself, the whole sternum is completely bony. 

 Nor, argued Geoffroy, was it true to say. as Cuvier had 

 said, that the like occurred in the Pigeons and true 

 Passerines. In their case the sternum begins to ossify 

 from three very distinct points — one of which is the centre 

 of ossification of the keel. As regards the Struthious Birds, 

 they could not be likened to the Duck, for in them at no 

 age was there any indication of a single median centre of 

 ossification, as Geoffroy had satisfied himself by his own 

 observations made in Egypt many years before. Cuvier 

 seems to have acquiesced in the corrections of his views 

 made by Geoffroy, and attempted no rejoinder ; but the 

 attentive and impartial student of the discussion will see 

 that a good deal was really wanting to make the latter's 

 reply effective, though, as events have shewn, the former 

 was hasty in the conclusions at which he arrived, having 

 trusted too much to the first appearance of centres of 

 ossification, for, had his observations in regard to other 

 Birds been carried on with the same attention to detail as 

 in regard to the Fowl, he would certainly have reached 

 some very different results. 



In 1834 Gloger brought out at Breslau the first (and unfortu- Gloger. 

 nately the only) part, of a. J'ulls/ttntligcs HaniHutrh tier Kutur- 

 geschichte der Vogcl Europa's, treating of the Land-birds. In the 

 Introduction to this book (p. xxxviii., note) he expressed his regret 

 at not being able to use as fully as he could wish the excellent 

 researches of Nitzsch which were then appearing (as has been above 

 said) in the successive parts of Kallmann's great work. Notwith- 

 standing this, to Gloger seems to belong the credit of being the first 

 author to avail himself in a book intended for practical ornitho- 

 logists of the new light that had already been shed on Systematic 

 Ornithology; and accordingly we have the second Order of his 

 arrangement, the Aves Passerinse, divided into two Suborders: — 

 Singing Passerines ■ ///< /di/»,s,t), and Passerines without an apparatus 

 of Song-muscles {anomalse) — the latter including what some later 

 writers called Picarias. For the rest his classification demands no 

 particular remark ; but that in a work of this kind he had the 

 courage to recognize, for instance, such a fact as the essential 

 difference between Swallows ami Swifts lifts him considerably above 

 the crowd of other ornithological w liters of his time. 



An improvement on the old method of classification by purely 

 external characters was introduced to the Academy of Sciences of 

 Stockholm by Sundevall in 1835, and was published the following Smide- 

 year in its ]'[tni<Ui injur (pp. 43-130). This was the foundation of vail, 

 a more extensive work of which, from the influence it still exerts, 

 it will be necessary to treat later at some length, and there will be 

 no need now to enter much into details respecting the earlier per- 

 formance. It is sufficient here to remark that the author, even then 

 a man of great erudition, must have been aware of the turn which 

 taxonomy was taking; but, not being able to divest himself of the 

 older notion that external characters were superior to those fur- 

 nished by the study of internal structure, and that Comparative 

 Anatomy, instead of being a part of Zoology, was something dis- 

 tini't from it, he seems to have endeavoured to form a scheme which, 

 while not running wholly counter to tic teachings of Comparative 

 Anatomists, should yet rest ostensibly on external characters. With 

 this view he studied the latter most laboriously, and in some 

 measure certainly not without success, for he brought into promin- 

 ence several points that had hitherto escaped the notice of his pre- 

 decessors, lie also admitted among his characteristics a physio- 

 logical consideration (apparently derived from Oken 1 ) dividing the 

 class ./res into two sections Altrircs and 7Va;e,,,w, according as the 

 young wre fed by theii parents or, from the first, fed themselves. 

 But at this time he was encumbered with the hazy doctrine of 

 analogies, which, if it did not act to his detriment, was assuredly 

 of no service to him. He prefixed an "Idea Systematis" to his 

 "Expositio"; and the former, which appears to represent his real 

 opinion, differs in arrangement very considerably from the latter. 

 Like Gloger, Sundevall in his ideal system separated the true 

 I'. i serines from all other Ilinls, calling them Volucres ; but he took 

 ;i step further, for he assigned to them the highest rank, wherein 



1 He says fr ken's Naturgeschichte fiir Schulen, published in 



1821, but the divi ion is to be found in that author's earlier Lehrbuch 

 der Zoologie (ii. p. 371), which appeared in 1816. 



