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namely, its head, and especially its face : by the structure of the 
face, which must have all things else in harmony with it, he has 
sought to give the birds a true morphological grouping. Such a 
system of taxonomy has great and evident value ; but in the pre- 
sent state of our knowledge the physiognomical groups do not 
admit of simple superposition on the morphological groups. In 
some cases they fit accurately ; in others they come short in one 
place and overlap in another ; and thus the zoologist has to “ drive 
two-in-hand” through the various ornithological territories; and 
as the various regions in a geological map cannot be made to cor- 
respond with political or with ethnological divisions, so it is in our 
present attempts at making the two taxonomic modes of bird-survey 
agree. 
If the palate of a Fowl be examined, it will be seen to be 
deeply cleft ; if that of a Goose, the cleft will be found to be closed 
in front : the palate of a Podargus (Giant Goatsucker) has its two 
sides bound together by two bony plates — the hard palate. The 
cleft in the Fowl and Goose is divided into two, by the “ vomer,” or 
ploughshare-bone, which lies at the middle. 
In the Fowl neither the upper maxillaries nor the palatines 
meet at the mid-fine below; in the Goose the maxillaries do thus 
meet and combine ; in Podargus both the maxillaries and palatines 
coalesce, as in Man and the other Mammalia. 
For the perfectly cloven palate of the Fowl, Professor Huxley 
has coined the term “ Schizognathous ” ; for the half-closed palate 
of the Goose, as well as for the well-floored palate of the Podargus, 
the same Mint has yielded the term “ Desmognathous.” 
But the Crow-form stands in need of another name for its type 
of palate than either of these ; and, as the Common Sparrow well 
displays this third kind of mouth-roof, our bold group-maker calls 
it the “ /Egitliognatlious ” palate. Now I could have wished that 
either this bird or the Crow had given both names, that is to say, 
to the general type and to the palate; then we should have had 
the Coracomorphous birds with Coracognathous faces, or the iEgitho- 
morpfious birds with ZEgithognatfious faces. 
Nevertheless, the two groups are almost at one, in reality, and 
it does not weigh a feather with me how the thing is put, if so be 
the student will get his mind clear upon the subject. 
The cleft in the Sparrow or Crow’s face is stopped-up in front, 
not by coalescence of the maxillary bones, which are similar to 
those of a Fowl, but by having a double vomer, which unites at the 
mid-line in front, where it is broad, emarginate, and winged. 
These antero-lateral wings are supplied on each side with an 
additional bone. The two bones are grafted upon the cartilaginous 
nasal walls and their long scrolls — the “ali-nasal” or “ anterior 
(not inferior) turbinals.” 
