242 Recent Literature. eat 
Gadow— but here we must put a period, at p. zoS of the Introduction. 
Most of these names will convey their own moral to every well-informed 
ornithologist, as readily as Merrem calls to mind /eatéte and Carinate, 
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. $2-86), chiefly devoted to his 
paper of 1867, 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 worth 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 eye 
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 
Tentamen] 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 
