INTRODUCTION 69 
plainer for his successors to see than he himself was able to see it. What 
remains to add is that the celebrity of its author actually procured for 
the first portion of his researches notice in England (Ann. Nat. Hist. xvii. 
p. 499), though it must be confessed not then to any practical purpose. 
It is now necessary to revert to the year 1842, in which Dr. Cornay 
of Rochefort communicated to the French Academy of Sciences a memoir 
on a new Classification of Birds, of which, however, nothing but a notice 
has been preserved (Comptes Rendus, xiv. p. 164). Two years later this 
was followed by a second contribution from him on the same subject, and 
of this only an extract appeared in the official organ of the Academy (op. 
cit. xvi. pp. 94, 95), though an abstract was inserted in one scientific journal 
(L’Institut, xii. p. 21), and its first portion in another (Journal des 
Deécouvertes, i. p. 250). The Revue Zoologique for 1847 (pp. 360-369) 
contained the whole, and enabled naturalists to consider the merits of the 
author’s project, which was to found a new Classification of Birds on the 
form of the anterior palatal bones, which he declared to be subjected 
more evidently than any other to certain fixed laws. These laws, as for- 
mulated by him, are that (1) there is a coincidence of form of the anterior 
palatal bones and of the cranium in Birds of the same Order ; (2) thereis a 
likeness between the anterior palatal bones in Birds of the same Order ; (3) 
there are relations of likeness between the anterior palatal bones in groups 
of Birds which are near to one another. These laws, he added, exist in 
regard to all parts that offer characters fit for the methodical arrangement 
of Birds, but it is in regard to the anterior palatal bones that they un- 
questionably offer the most evidence. In the evolution of these laws Dr. 
Cornay had most laudably studied, as his observations prove, a vast 
number of different types, and the upshot of his whole labours, though 
not very clearly stated, was such as wholly to subvert the classification at 
that time generally adopted by French ornithologists. He of course knew 
the investigations of L’Herminier and De Blainville on sternal formation, 
and he also seems to have been aware of some pterylological differences 
exhibited in Birds—whether those disclosed by Nitzsch or those by Jacque 
min is not stated. True it is the latter were never published in full, 
but it is conceivable that Dr. Cornay may have known their drift. Be 
that as it may, he declares that characters drawn from the sternum or the 
pelvis—hitherto deemed to be, next to the bones of the head, the most 
important portions of the bird’s framework—are scarcely worth more, from 
a classificatory point of view, than characters drawn from the bill or the 
legs; while pterylological considerations, together with many others to 
which some systematists had attached more or less importance, can only 
assist, and apparently must never be taken to control, the force of evi- 
dence furnished by this bone of all bones—the anterior palatal. 
1 More than 80 years after proper tribute was rendered to one who by his 
investigations had so materially advanced the study of Ornithology, since in 1878 
Mr. Sclater procured the publication at Oxford of.an English version of this treatise 
under the title of Johannes Miiller on Certain Variations in the Vocal Organs of the 
Passeres that have hitherto escaped notice. It was translated by Prof. Jeffrey Bell, 
and Garrod added an appendix containing a summary of his own continuation of the 
same line of research. By some unaccountable accident, the date of the original com- 
munication to the Academy of Berlin is wrongly printed. It is rightly given above. 
