Miscellaneous. A73 
referred to will prove that my recollection is right. At any rate 
the mounting referred to agrees absolutely with the specimen here 
described from Polperro as C. Montagui (A). 
On the Salivary Apparatus of Birds. By Dr, A.-H. Prvurer. 
_ The system of salivary glands appears to be somewhat slightly 
dey eloped in birds, and there scarcely exist any comprehensive 
memoirs upon the subject. 
This is due to the difficulty of isolating very small groups of 
glands buried beneath corneous membranes, of which the dry and 
apparently unlubricated surface negatives the very idea of a 
salivary secretion. Milne-Edwards barely devotes a few lines to 
the matter; these excretory organs, he states, have but. little 
importance, and are only very imperfectly known. The fact is that 
Duvernoy, Meckel, Miller, Sebold, Stannius, Chauveau, and 
Wiedersheim have only described elands large enough to be isolated 
by the scalpel—such as the sub- lingual eland of the goose, the 
palatine glands of the ostrich; the groups ‘of glands of the wood- 
pecker, the parrots, and the climbers ; and even the descriptions of . 
these authors convey the impression of isolated and not coordinated 
facts. Prof. Ranvier in his course of lectures for 1883 * returned 
to the study of these glands, and gave a general description of them, 
while insisting that the classifications of the old anatomists were 
fallacious as a natural consequence of their method. As as matter 
of fact, by analogy with higher animals, parotid, sub-lingual, and 
submaxillary glands were described in the comparative anatomy of 
birds. Now, the morphological type represented by the bird, which 
is very far removed from that of mammals, on the contrary greatly 
resembles that of the Saurians and Chelonians: and it is with the 
members of the latter greups, in which the glands of the mouth and 
pharynx locate themselves where they can, ‘and are spread out and 
hidden beneath a more or less rigid mucous membrane, that the 
bird must be compared. 
We have studied the salivary glands of birds with respect both 
to their situation and their structure. The method of examination 
was as follows: the head was fixed by means of a preservative fluid, 
decalcified with picrie acid supplemented with formic acid, hardened, 
and cut into slices. These successive manipulations are not without 
detriment to the study of the cellular substance, but they are of 
great service in enabling us to make out the situation of the groups 
of glands ; and sections made from strips of excised mucous mem- 
brane have rendered it possible for us to give precision to the typo- 
graphical information afforded by the broad slices. 
I. ARRANGEMENT OF THE GLANDs.—a. The upper jaw.—In the 
duck the glands form very abundant groups in the upper jaw, 
especially at its centre. They do not exist at the base, and the 
~ 
* L, Ranvier, Journal de Micrographie, 1884, p. 146. 
