Vol. XIX ■ 

 1902 



General Notes. nC 



I fed him on boiled eggs and prepared mockingbird food, and a few meal 

 worms. 



One evening about the last week in December, 1900, while I was watch- 

 ing him bathe, evening being his favorite time for bathing, the poor little 

 fellow's head dropped over the side of the bath, and after a few convulsive 

 twitches he was dead. I had not time to make him into a skin, so sent him 

 to a taxidermist, who imfortunatelv did not take the sex. — J. H.Ames, 

 Toronto., Ontario. 



Clark on the Classification of Birds. — Mi-. Clark's most able and inter- 

 esting article on the classification of birds, in 'The Auk' for October 

 (XVIII, pp. 370-3S1) while showing the great value of ptervlographj, is one 

 more example of the danger of attempting to base a system of classifica- 

 tion on one character. Also it is a warning not to use external characters 

 for the definition of great groups, but rather to rest them on the firmer 

 foundation of characters afforded by the skeleton. This remark is natur- 

 ally aimed at the combination of Tinamous and fowls to form one of the 

 "old, worn-out ' orders ' " complained of by the author at the commence- 

 ment of his paper. 



Mr. Clark assumes that changes of habit are soon (italics mine) followed 

 by changes of structure, and although nothing is brought forward to sus- 

 tain this statement, it may be freely admitted that many features of a 

 bird's skeleton are at least adaptive, as in all other vertebrates, and that 

 one of the stumbling blocks in the path of "the avian taxonomist " is the 

 extent to which morphological structure may be obscured by adaptation. 

 Nevertheless, this modification does not extend to the more impoitant 

 features, and particular objection must be made to the assertion that the 

 skull is speciall}' liable to adaptive changes. For while the external 

 shape may be influenced the fundamental structure of the skull is un- 

 changed, and although a passerine bird, for example, may have the 

 slender bill of a honey creeper or the wide and short beak of a swallow, 

 the skull is built on the same plan. Again, no feature is more character- 

 istic of the Passeres than the structure of the hypotarsus, and while 

 pterylosis may unite " Passeres and Picarians," the upper end of the 

 tarsus shows at a glance whether or not, from Wren to Raven, a bird is a 

 member of the upper 6000 of avian society. That the so-called picarian 

 birds seem to, and do, form a heterogeneous assemblage is believed by 

 many ornithologists to be due to the fact that they represent what may 

 be called Nature's attempts to construct a passerine bird, being so many 

 stages in the line of evolution, on the one hand reaching towards the 

 higher type of birds, on the other retaining traces of their ancestry and 

 of their affinity to other forms, while over all is the mantle of specializa- 

 tion along certain lines. 



But if Mr. Clark thinks that modifications of the skeleton are adaptive 

 and due to mechanical causes, what does he think of the juain features of 

 the pterylosis? If these be not due to adaptation, then there is no such 



