[26 



NATURE 



\_April lo, 1879 



vented international booksellers from existing, and made 

 it far more difficult to obtain in London a work published 

 in'Paris or Leipzig than it now is to get one that has been 

 printed in Chili or Japan. Next— perhaps it should have 

 been placed first— there was the lamentable fact that so 

 defective was English education, that few boys were 

 taught to read a book in any modern language but their 

 own. Enormous time was wasted at school over Greek 

 and Latin, which, owing to the senseless method of 

 teaching, were, as now, scarcely ever taught to any useful 

 purpose. A smattering of French was sometimes picked 

 up by boys when at home for the holidays, but that was 

 all. German was an utterly unknown tongue. All this 

 is of course notorious. To the ordinary English gentle- 

 man it mattered nothing, nor did it signify very much to 

 the literary man, but on the man of science its effect was 

 disastrous, and especially was it so to the naturalist. 

 Most of Cuvier's works had been, it is true, translated, 

 so they were open to all, but this was a very exceptional 

 case. Probably no British ornithologist had ever heard 

 of Merrem, Tiedemann, or Meckel ; assuredly no British 

 ornithologist was acquainted with their writings. Yarrell, 

 Macgillivray, and Blyth had each made some advance 

 in certain directions, and the last two were unquestionably 

 not fettered by Quinarian bonds, but their advance was 

 rather that of scouts than that of permanent occupiers. 

 Later came Nitzsch, Dr. Cabanis, and the illustrious 

 author of the work under review — in Germany, and — in 

 Sweden, Sundevall ; but still no eftect was produced on 

 our insular mind. 



It was Nitzsch who first began the great work of criti- 

 cally examining the Linnaean Orders, Passeres and Pica 

 — the very names of which had passed out of use and 

 were well nigh forgotten in this country, being superseded 

 by the term Insessores. In his anatomical contributions 

 to Naumann's excellent " Vogel Deutschland's," a work 

 still far from being appreciated in England, in his treatise 

 on the Carotid Artery of Birds — which unfortunately yet 

 remains in the obscurity of its original Latin, and much 

 more completely in his "Pterylographie" — edited after his 

 death by Dr. Burmeister, and only translated into English 

 for the Ray Society in 1867 — the most important struc- 

 tural differences and affinities between the various forms 

 so classed by Linnaeus were clearly shown. The Order 

 Passeres (or Passerince as Nitzsch called it) was revised 

 and reconstructed, some genera being added and others 

 excluded, while a majority of the Linnsean Piece became 

 the PicaricB of Nitzsch — a very heterogeneous assemblage 

 it must be allowed— the old name being unsuitable, 

 since the genus Pica was found to be truly Passerine. 

 But Nitz ch had the opportunity of dissecting but few if 

 any of the New- World forms, and consequently he did 

 not know that many American Passeres differed essentially 

 from those of the Old World in the structure of their 

 vocal organs. This fact it seems was first ascertained by 

 Macgilli ^ ray,^ but he did not see its importance, which 

 was really recognised by Miiller, and the latter's discovery 

 was the cause of the treatise now translated for us after 

 so many years by Mr. Bell, and edited by Mr. Garrod. 



^ Mull r in the work under review (Trans!., pp. 5 and 6) makes the mis- 

 take, wh c 11 his translator or editor might, we think, have corrected, of 

 attributing > he anatomical portions of the "Ornithological Biography" to 

 Audubon I I'hey are admittedly; by Macgillivray, who is known to have 

 abo helped largely in the composition of that work. 



Though ornithologists have by no means followed up 

 Miiller's investigations as they deserved, the period that 

 has elapsed since their publication has not been alto- 

 gether idly passed, and Mr. Garrod has enhanced the 

 value of his coadjutor's translation by adding thereto an 

 appendix bringing the knowledge of the subject almost 

 "up to date," and incorporating the results of his own 

 labours thereon. Miiller, however, was no more free 

 from error than his predecessors had been. He divided 

 his '^ Passerinen'" — to which he applied the Vigorsian 

 title of Insessores — into three tribes : — (i) the Oscines or 

 Polymyodi, "having the lower larynx formed partly by 

 the trachea and partly by the bronchi, and possessing 

 five or six pairs of muscles attached to the end of certain 

 of the bronchial rings " ; (2) the Tracheophones, " with 

 the lower larynx formed exclusively by a modification of 

 the lower part of the trachea"; and (3) the Picarii, 

 "with the larynx either partly tracheal and partly 

 bronchial, or wholly bronchial and with not more than 

 three pairs of muscles."' The Ptcarii of Miiller, how- 

 ever, form a group not quite commensurate with the 

 Picaria of Nitszch, and this is a point to which attention 

 should be directed, as, owing to the very slight difference 

 between the two names, one has been frequently written 

 for the other, and the two groups deemed to be identical. 

 Nitzsch very properly excluded what are now known as the 

 Tyrannidce from his Picarice, while Miiller, as improperly, 

 included them among his Picarii. Both authors also erred 

 in their conception of the family Ampelidce, which, in the 

 sense in which it is used by them comprises two very dis- 

 tinct groups, the Ampelidce proper and the Cotingidce. 

 Nitzsch, whose experience had lain with the single Euro- 

 pean representative of the former, placed the family 

 among his Passeres, while Miiller, judging it would appear 

 from the New- World genera, which are now more rightly 

 held to compose the Cotingidce, referred the family to his 

 Picarii. It is nowadays abundantly clear that the true 

 Ampelidce are very normal Passeres, while the Cotinoidce 

 are not Passeres in the most restricted sense. But it is 

 impossible for us here to go into details. Mr. Garrod's 

 appendix will show how and to what good purpose he, 

 with the abundant opportunities he has enjoyed, has fol- 

 lowed Miiller's line of research, and has greatly extended 

 it. We certainly wish he had more explicitly set forth, 

 in a tabular form for instance, the general results of his 

 continuous investigations. The want of some such sum- 

 mary is the only serious complaint we have to make 

 against this book ; and, regretting as we do its absence, 

 we think we can perceive what has possibly been the mo- 

 tive of his abstention — his consciousness that there is yet 

 much more to be done, that few conclusions drawn at 

 present can be otherwise than general, and that fewer 

 still can be final. On one important point, however, he 

 corroborates what we imagine to have been a singularly 

 interesting discovery of Prof. Huxley's, namely, the di- 

 vergence of Menura (the Lyre-bird) from almost all the 

 other Passeres, its only relative (and the relationship can 

 hardly be very close) being Atrichia. 



Our sincere thanks, and those of every English-speaking 

 ornithologist, are due to all concerned in this book— to 

 Mr. Sclater, whose influence with the Clarendon Press 



' These definitions are taken from Prof. Huxley (Proc. Zool. Soc., 1867. 

 p. 471), being expressed with his usual admirable terseness. 



