INTRODUCTION ob) 
the general structure than those furnished by the carorip artery only. 
Among all the species (188, he tells us, in number) of which he examined 
specimens, he found only fowr variations in the structure of that vessel , 
but so much has since been done in this way that there is no need to 
dwell on his particular researches, and the reader may be referred to Dr. 
Gadow’s article in the text of this work (pp. 76, 77). 
Considering the enormous stride in advance made by L’Herminier, it 
is very disappointing for the historian to have to record that the next 
inquirer into the osteology of Birds achieved a disastrous failure in his 
attempt to throw light on their arrangement by means of a comparison of 
their sternum. This was Berthold, who devoted a long chapter of his 
Beitrige zur Anatomie, published at Gottingen in 1831, to a consideration 
of the subject. So far as his introductory chapter went—the development 
of the sternum—he was, for his time, right enough and somewhat 
instructive. It was only when, after a close examination of the sternal 
apparatus of 130 species, which he carefully described, that he arrived 
(pp. 177-183) at the conclusion—astonishing to us who know of L’Her- 
minier’s previous results—that the sternum of Birds cannot be used as a 
help to their classification on account of the egregious anomalies that 
would follow the proceeding—such anomalies, for instance, as the 
separation of Cypselus from Hirundo and its alliance with Trochilus, and 
the grouping of Hirundo and Fringilla together. He seems to have 
been persuaded that the method of Linnzus and his disciples was 
indisputably right, and that any method which contradicted it must 
therefore be wrong. Moreover, he appears to have regarded the sternal 
structure as a mere function of the Bird’s habit, especially in regard to 
its power of flight, and to have wholly overlooked the converse position 
that this power of flight must depend entirely on the structure. Good 
descriptive anatomist as he certainly was, he was false to the anatomist’s 
creed ; but 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 more salient and obvious features, had not capacity 
to interpret the meaning of the whole. Yet 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 Sciences of Paris a memoir on the progress of ossification in 
the sternum of Birds, of which memoir an abstract will be found in the 
Annales des Sciences Naturelles (xxv. pp. 260-272). Herein he treated 
of several subjects with which we are not particularly concerned 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 he 
exhibited, the progress of ossification in the sternum of the Fowl and of 
the Duck, pointing out how it differed in each, and giving his inter- 
pretation of the differences. It had hitherto been generally believed 
that the mode of ossification in the Fowl was that which obtained in all 
