of the Swifts and Humming-birds. 35 



any other step at the time he wrote than to convert Nitzsch's 

 " Macroehires " into his " Cypselomorphge/' plus the Capri- 

 mulgi — a group which Nitzsch had the wisdom to keep apart. 



Sundevall (1872-74), in his ' Tentamen/ placed the Swifts 

 in one '^ Cohors " and the Humming-birds in another, and 

 this was seven years after Huxley wrote his Classification. 

 Sundevall devoted his entire life to the science of orni- 

 thology; he wrote a complete classification of birds, which, 

 though faulty in many particulars, was correct in others, and 

 was based almost entirely upon the study of their external 

 characters. 



But we have a better man than Sundevall in Macgillivray, 

 and there is good evidence that the latter made a very careful 

 study of nearly the entire structure of at least one species of 

 Humming-bird. He is probably responsible, too, for the 

 classification set forth in Audubon's great work ; and in that 

 work the Swifts are placed near the Swallows and far asunder 

 from the Humming-birds. Macgillivray was aware of the 

 extraordinarily large heart in the Trochili, of the peculiarities 

 in the tongue, in the gizzard, the feet {'' proportionally as 

 large as those of a Cormorant^'), in the pterylosis, in the 

 air-passages, and in many other parts. 



Mr. William Brewster, of Cambridge, Mass., a very distin- 

 guished American ornithologist, believes " that a Swift is 

 merely a peculiar kind of Swallow ^^*; Mr. Harting believes 

 that ''the relationship between the Cypseli and Trochili has 

 been overstated, not to say exaggerated " (Ibis, 1893, p. 93) ; 

 and I could mention a good many others holding the 

 same opinion. But what such men believe is supported by 

 those who have made life-long studies of the structure 

 of birds — not only of their osteology, as Mr. Lucas has done, 

 but of their myology, their embryology, their neurology, 

 their pneumatology, their angiology, and everything else 

 that relates to their biology. All these systems afford cha- 

 racters quite as good as those offered by the skeleton. Take 

 such a man, for instance, as was Professor William Kitchen 

 Parker (and the world has produced but very, very few men 

 * Amer. Nat., April 1893 p. 370. 



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