1862. ] OF PTEROCLES, SYRRHAPTES, AND TINAMUS. 259 
some mysterious way without the help of feet) to speak of the stilted 
Hemipodius, an aberrant gallinaceous bird, which has escaped from 
its more steady walking allies to join the true coursing birds. 
Without heel, with not only naked tarsi, but with the lower half of 
the tibie bare ; what can these birds be but true essential ‘ Gralla. 
“They may be in a sense grallatorial, but are not really so, as we 
shall see, if we work out their mixed affinities. 
“The Hemipodii (some of which are very small, and, like some 
other small creatures, very pugnacious) stand pretty exactly between 
the Tinamous and the Quails ; but not quite so, for the Pigeon comes 
in again, even here, with a touch of kinship, the connecting links 
being the Didunculus and the dwarf Ground-Pigeons (Chamepelia). | 
«The characters of head are almost equally divided between those 
of the Ground-Pigeon and the Quail ; the sternum, between the Quail 
and Tinamou ; yet the legs are those of a little Sand-Plover, although 
they are hinged upon a pelvis which would require but little altering 
to suit a Quail. 
“I must ask for more time and space, if not to settle this diffi- 
culty, yet to put it into a proper form for some fuller mind to ex- 
plain ; for it seems to me that my position of ‘interpreter’ is in this 
case more perplexing than that of the purblind patriarch, who found 
the hands of his hairy son Esau combined with the vocal organs of 
the smooth-limbed Jacob. 
“T have now merely to speak of the Tinamous; and in their case 
also I must merely indicate the kind of task they present to him 
who would fairly work them out. 
“In the first place, let me at once say that they have no right to 
the dignity of the gallinaceous title ; they are little struthious birds, 
looking upwards from that simple rudimentary beginning of the 
beautiful ornithic type. 
“Nearly all the specialization of this bird, by which it rises above 
the Struthionide, is in the direction of the true or typical gallina- 
ceous bird, and not towards the Ptarmigans, as is the case of the 
Sand-Grouse. 
“The Hemipodius runs upwards towards the little flat-bodied 
typical Quails; but there is no bird better for comparison with the 
Tinamou than the common Hen. Nine-tenths of the characters of 
the bony structures of the head in this bird are truly struthious: 
the residium belonging half to the Plover and half to the Fowl. 
“Tt is not a little curious, however, that it outdoes the Plover in 
one thing, viz. the structure of the supraorbital region; for whilst 
the nasal or supraorbital glands in the Pluvialine are protected by 
a continuous beam of bone, the Tinamou has the unique character 
of a series of those bones. In the young Ring-Dottrel I find a series 
of square denticles growing out from the margin of the frontal below, 
and external to the large gland; these exogenous processes fuse 
together in the adult. 
“Thad racked my memory to find an instance of multiplied supra- 
_ orbitals in a vertebrate skull, but in vain, when one turned up to 
me on examining the Reptilian skeletons in the Museum of the Col. 
