A BIRD’S MODERN KINSFOLK. PAI 
that the crow-jay forms are the highest birds, because 
their brains and digestive systems show greatest per- 
fection. Others think the thrushes the highest, be- 
cause of the perfection of song muscles and the scale- 
less condition of the shank, already noted. 
Indeed, in looking over our diagram we must not 
be misled by its order of arrangement. While the 
fowls, rails, plovers, herons, gulls, etc., may each by 
their varying diverging lines of kinship seem to be 
centers of development for other groups around them, 
we can not always assert that they are so. Nearly all 
groups have yet in them some very old forms. The 
secretary bird in the hawks shows evidence of being 
as old as the screamer in the geese, and as the brush 
turkeys or curassows in the fowls; and away up later 
cuckoos are tied to a bird (the hoactzin) so reptilian as 
to crawl by claws, and yet have a naked nestling, while 
the lyre bird with song muscles has young that are 
downy like a precocial bird’s. 
Instead of looking at the limes running between 
these little circles as branches of a tree, we should 
have a better presentation if we imagined ourselves 
directly above the tree, and that the circles repre- 
sented the branches sawed off at different levels which 
we saw “end on.” The kinship, then, would be in- 
dicated not only by nearness of the circles to each other, 
and by the tie lines between, but also by the regions 
on the trunk out of which the branches grew. These, 
of course, we can not see. Thus the hawks (say), 
while apparently high, may have their limb run into 
the trunk below the limb bearing the fowls. The 
