1900. ] SHUFELDT—OSTEOLOGY OF THE STRIGES. 671 
the classification of other Owls, and add to the misgivings that every 
honest ornithologist must feel as to former attempts to methodize the 
whole group—misgivings that had already arisen from the great diver- 
sity of opinion displayed by previous classifiers, no two of whom seem 
able to agree. 
‘‘ Moreover, the difficulties which beset the study of the Owls are not 
limited to their respective relations, but extend to their scientific ter- 
minology, which has long been ina state so bewildering that nothing 
but the strictest adherence to the very letter of the laws of nomencla- 
ture, which are approved in principle by all but an insignificant number 
of naturalists, can clear up the confusion into which the matter has been 
thrown by heedless or ignorant writers—some of those who are in gen- 
eral most careful to avoid error being not wholly free from blame in 
this respect.”’ 
Did my space but admit of it, I would here republish even still 
more of this admirable article of Prof. Newton’s, as in my opinion 
it constitutes one of the most able short contributions that has 
ever been added to the literature of this subject. 
Upon consulting the Plates and text of so distinguished an au- 
thority’s work as Prof. Max Fiirbringer’s Untersuchungen zur Mor- 
phologie und Systematik der Vogel, we are to note that there the 
Caprimulgi and Striges are considered as arising from a common 
ancestral stock, the suborder Coracziformes of the Order Coracor- 
nithes, and this last-named division is quite apart from the Order 
Pelargonithes, which contains the Accipitres. This is the view 
which is held by the present writer, and in so far as our United 
States Owls are concerned I consider the suborder S¢riges is rep- 
resented by the two families—(1) the S/igéde, containing the sin- 
gle genus and species, Strix pratincola, and (2) the Budbonide, 
which holds all the others—some eleven genera with the many 
species enumerated above. 
Mr. F. E. Beddard, in a very excellent little paper published 
not long ago in Zhe /éis, says upon this point that 
“the most obvious characters which distinguish the skull of S/zx from 
that of the remaining genera have been pointed out by Milne-Edwards ;' 
they are, firstly, the greatly elongated and narrow form of the skull in 
Stix contrasted with the wide short skull of other types; secondly, the 
relatively great thickness of the bones which make up the interorbital 
septum in S/zx as compared with the extremely thin interorbital sep- 
tum of other Owls. 
1 Nouv. Arch., etc., p. 189. 
