26 R. W. SHUFELDT, 
Pl. 11). This StELLEr’s eider has a peculiar skull in any event, and 
in it the lacrymals are conspicuously small for an anserine bird. 
Many years ago, I made a drawing of the “hyoid bones of a 
goose” for Dr. Erziort Covzes, who published it in several editions 
of his Key to North American Birds (5. Ed. Vol. 1, p. 173, fig. 72, 
Boston, 1905). To the best of my recollection, the bones of the 
hyoidean apparatus there figured were those of a specimen of 
Branta camadensis, which I shot in Wyoming, about forty years ago. 
In any event, they correctly present the osseous elements of that 
arch in an adult anserine, and they will save me the labor of re- 
produeing them for the work now in hand. Morphologically, these 
hyoid bones in the Canada goose agree very closely with the corre- 
sponding ones as we find them in Dendrocygna autumnalis, in D. 
bicolor, and probably in all the other species of “Tree-Ducks”. I 
have also compared them with the same elements in a Swan and 
have met with no marked differences. 
The bony glosso-hyal is large and much elongated, with a 
characteristic facet at its posterior end for articulation with the 
basihyal, and a small concavity at its distal end for the reception 
of a cartilaginous prolongation of the glosso-hyal. This, I believe, 
exists in all theAnseres. The basihyal and basibranchial 
or urohyal fuse into one piece in the adult, and the latter is 
produced posteriorly by a cartilaginous tip, which varies in length 
in different species and genera.!) The ceratobranchials are 
very long and but slightly curved; whereas the shorter epibran- 
chials are considerably so, in that they may conform to the back 
of the skull, behind which they curl up during the life of the in- 
dividual. As combined, on either side, the ceratobranchial and epi- 
branchial form a long, curved thyro-hyal; or one of the two 
limbs of the “greater cornea”. 
Upon a comparative examination, we find that the characters 
of the hyoidean apparatus in Dendrocygna, Olor, and the typical 
wild geese, as well as in the true ducks (Anas etc.) present no note- 
worthy variations, as is the case with some I have examined, and 
probably with others which I have not. For example, in Oidemia 
verspicillata the glosso-hyal is broadly elliptical in outline, much 
concaved from before, backwards, superiorly, and correspondingly 
convexed beneath, while transversely, above, it is convexed and 
1) SHUFELDT, R. W., Osteology of Birds, p. 282 and 314, fig. 42. 
