666 SHU FELDT—OSTEOLOGY OF THE STRIGES. [Dec. 7, 
in either my private collection or in the collections of the U. S. 
National Museum at Washington. All the figures, however, illus- 
trating the early papers on the osteology of the Burrowing Owl have 
in the present memoir been omitted, it not having been thought 
necessary to republish them, as they can be consulted by any student 
of the subject in the above quoted publications. This does not, 
however, apply to the text matter of the original article, for it is 
taken up in the present work and incorporated in the general com- 
parisons made throughout, wherein the osteological characters of all 
the American species of Owls have been contrasted and employed to 
meet the ends of taxonomy. Apart from a few brief notes, the 
anatomy of Owls was not touched by me again until 1889, when in 
the Journal of Morphology (Vol. iii, No. 1. pp. 115-125, Pl. vii) I 
contributed a paper on the Burrowing Owl, entitled /Vozes on the 
Anatomy of the Speotyto cunicularia hypogea ; but little was eaids in 
it about the osteology of the species. 
Several years later I published in one place or another a number . 
of papers treating of fossil birds, and in some of these descriptions 
of fossil bones of Owls are given, notably of a Budo in my memoir 
on A Study of the Fossil Avifauna of the Equus Beds of the Oregon 
Desert (Jour. Acad. Nat. Sci. Phila., Vol. ix, Pls. xv—xvii, 4to, 
Phila., Oct., 1892, pp. 389-425). Quite a number of popular papers 
were algo published about the American species of the Strzgzd@, but 
nothing of a nature to be considered here. Indeed, up to the 
present writing I have published no paper requiring further notice 
in this place, beyond my memoir entitled Professor Collett on the 
Morphology of the Cranium and the Auricular Openings tn the North- 
European Species of the Family Strigide (Jour. Morphology, Vol. 
xvii, No. 1, Boston, 1g00). This somewhat elaborate production, 
upward of one hundred printed pages, is illustrated by thirty 
lithographic figures of the skulls and plucked heads of Owls, and 
some seven or eight text figures of a similar character. A number 
of genera and species are thus shown, but none of those figures are 
reproduced here, for the same reason as the one given in a a former 
paragraph of this Introduction. 
The present memoir, however, claims to be a very general con- 
tribution to the study and comparison of the osteological characters 
presented on the part of the skeletons of all the North American 
species, or at least genera, of S¢tr7gide. The most of the text figures 
here offered have never been published by me heretofore, and the 
