242 Recent Literature. [apHI 



Gadow — but here we must put a period, at \). loS oi the Introduction. 

 Most of these names will convey their own moral to every well-informed 

 ornithologist, as readily as Merrem calls to mind Ratitce and Carinatce, 

 or Nitzsch brings up pterylography. But not all of them stand in the 

 pantheon — Berthold, for example, is dismissed with a sigh of relief, and 

 some others with even less emotion. In general, the space devoted to 

 each indicates fairly their weight in the scales of Professor Newton's 

 judgment, for he is not here setting up small authors to be cast down, but 

 great ones to be attentively regarded in the light of their respective con- 

 tributions to the edifice of the future; and he must be indeed an excep- 

 tionally well-informed ornithologist who has not much to learn of the 

 exact quantity and quality of these contributions from this masterly 

 exposition. We have spoken of its great difficulty and extreme delicacy 

 in some cases; we testify to its equal discernment and perfect fairness ; 

 and offer two cases in evidence. 



Huxley is treated in five pages (pp. 82-86), chiefly devoted to his 

 paper of 1S67, with this conclusion, as we think agreeable with a consen- 

 sus of expert opinion : 



"... That the palatal structure must be taken into consideration by 

 taxonomers as affording hints of some utility there could no longer 

 be a doubt; but the present writer is inclined to think that the characters 

 drawn thence owe more of their w-orth to the extraordinary perspicuity 

 with which they were presented by Huxley than to their own intrinsic 

 value, and that if the same power had been employed to elucidate in the 

 same way other parts of the skeleton — say the bones of the sternal appa- 

 ratus or even of the pelvic girdle — either set could have been made to 

 appear quite as instructive and perhaps more so. Adventitious value 

 would therefore seem to have been acquired by the bones of the palate 

 through the fact that so great a master of the art of exposition selected 

 them as fitting examples upon which to exercise his skill." 



Sundevall's case is perhaps the most remarkable among those Professor 

 Newton is called upon to weigh. Mutatis mutandis, it presents to our eje 

 some likeness to that of Macgillivray. The latter was an excellent 

 ornithotomist to whom Professor Newton gives well-deserved praise for 

 his observations, but who utterly failed to interpret his anatomical facts 

 to any useful taxonomic purpose, his classification being nugatory. 

 Sundevall was a man of vast and varied acquirements, the opposite of 

 Macgillivray in that he was a 'skin man ' sang pur, whose final achieve- 

 ment in classification was no better than Macgillivray's, if as good. But 

 let us hear Professor Newton on this score (p. 90:) 



"The only use of dwelling upon these imperfections [to wit, of Sundevall's 

 l^ntamen} here is the hope that thereby students of Ornithology may be 

 induced to abandon the belief in the efficacy of external characters as a 

 sole means of classification, and, seeing how unmanageable they become 

 unless checked by internal characters, be persuaded of the futility of any 

 attempt to form an arrangement without that solid foundation which can 



