INTRODUCTION 59 
Hitherto it will have been seen that our present business has lain 
wholly in Germany and France, for, as is elsewhere explained, the chief 
ornithologists of Britain were occupying themselves at this time in a 
very useless way—not but that there were several distinguished men in 
this country who were paying due heed at this time to the internal 
structure of Birds, and some excellent descriptive memoirs on special 
forms had appeared from their pens, to say nothing of more than one 
general treatise on ornithic anatomy.! Yet no one in Britain seems to 
have attempted to found any scientific arrangement of Birds on other 
than external characters until, in 1837, William Macgillivray issued the 
first volume of his History of British Birds, wherein, though professing 
(p. 19) “not to add a new system to the many already in partial use, or 
that have passed away like their authors,” he propounded (pp. 16-18) a 
scheme for classifying the Birds of Europe at least founded on a “ con- 
sideration of the digestive organs, which merit special attention, on 
account, not so much of their great importance in the economy of birds, 
as the nervous, vascular and other systems are not behind them in this 
respect ; but because, exhibiting great diversity of form and structure, 
in accordance with the nature of the food, they are more obviously 
qualified to afford a basis for the classification of the numerous species 
of birds” (p. 52). Experience has again and again exposed the fallacy 
of this last conclusion, but it is no disparagement of its author to say, 
group of Birds, but that the second mode is much the commonest. The same 
variations are observable in the second or middle rank, but its side-pieces are said to 
exist in all groups of Birds without exception. As to the third or posterior rank, 
when it is complete the three constituent pieces are developed almost simul- 
taneously ; but its median piece is said often to originate in two, which soon unite, 
especially when the side-pieces are wanting. By way of examples of L’Herminier’s 
observations, what he says of the two groups that had been the subject of Cuvier’s 
and the elder Geoffroy’s contest may be mentioned. In the Gallinz the five well- 
known pieces or centres of ossification are said to consist of the two side-pieces of 
the second or middle rank, and the three of the posterior. On two occasions, how- 
ever, there was found in addition, what may be taken for a representation of the 
first series, a little ‘‘noyau” situated between the coracoids—forming the only 
instance of all three ranks being present in the same Bird. As regards the Ducks, 
L’Herminier agreed with Cuvier that there are commonly only two centres of 
ossification—the side-pieces of the middle rank; but as these grow to meet one 
another a distinct median “noyaw,” also of the same rank, sometimes appears, which 
soon forms a connexion with each of them. In the Ostrich and its allies no trace 
of this median centre of ossification ever occurs; but its existence seems to be 
invariable in all other Birds. 
1 Owen’s celebrated article ‘Aves,’ in Todd’s Cyclopedia. of Anatomy and 
Physiology (i. pp. 265-358), appeared in 1836, and, as giving a general view of the 
structure of Birds, needs no praise here; but its object was not to establish a 
classification, or throw light especially on systematic arrangement. So far from 
that being the case, its distinguished author was content to adopt, as he tells us, the 
arrangement proposed by Kirby in the Seventh Bridgewater Treatise (ii. pp. 445- 
474), being that, it is true, of an estimable zoologist, but of one who had no special 
knowledge of Ornithology. Indeed it is, as the latter says, that of Linnzus, 
improved by Cuvier, with an additional modification of Illiger’s—all these three 
authors having totally ignored any but external characters. Yet it was regarded 
“as being the one which facilitates the expression of the leading anatomical differ- 
ences which obtain in the class of Birds, and which therefore may be considered ag 
the most natural ” ! 
