notp:s on the anatomy and affinities of the 

 ccerebid.e and other american birds. 



By Frederic A. Lucas. 



Curator of the Department of Comparative Anatomy. 



Some five or six years aoo I planned a paper on the ( Uierebidie which, 

 for hick of time and material, has lain at a standstill until the present 

 time. It is broujiht forward now, not because the necessary amount of 

 material has been obtained, but because it seems probable that if delayed 

 until the needed specimens are secured it will never be written, and 

 also in the hope that these notes and fiiiures may be of some service to 

 other students and save the trouble of again going over the entire 

 ground. It may, to some extent, be considered as a brief supplement 

 to Dr. Gadow's paper on the Structure of certain Hawaiian birds, as 

 comparisons are made with some of the species therein described. 



One in search of the relatives of any passerine bird has before him, 

 if not exactly a thankless task, something very nearly akin to it, and 

 one in which even comparatively small results can be reached only by 

 the expenditure of much time and labor. The birds which perch at the 

 top of the avian tree are so many in number and so exasperatingly 

 interrelated that any attempt at sorting them out is fraught with 

 much difficulty, or, as Dr. Gadow puts it, "the examination of a small, 

 twig of the passerine branch of the Avine tree shakes and disturbs the 

 whole branch, if not the whole top, of the famous ideal tree." So it has 

 been in the present case. Representatives of the Mniotiltid;e, Melipha- 

 gida>, Drepanidida', Tanagrid;ie, and Fringillida", have been examined 

 in the hope that the affinities of the Coerebid;e might be made apparent; 

 and I am compelled to confess that, on the whole, the result has been 

 unsatisfactory, and that the examination of a considerable number of 

 specimens has rather lessened my hopes that anatomical, and especially 

 osteological, characters may be relied upon to show relationship among 

 the passeres. 



Of course one trouble lies in the fact that the so-called families of 

 passeres, at least very many of them, are not families at all, or not the 

 equivalents of the families of other groups of vertebrates. It is my belief 

 that any group of vertebrates to be of family rank should be capable 



Proceedings of the l'. S. National Museum, Vol. XVII— No. 1001. 



299 



