1862.] OF PTEROCLES, SYRRHAPTES, AND TINAMUS. 259 



some mysterious way without the help of feet) to speak of the stilted 

 Ilemipodius, 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 tibiae bare ; what can these birds be but true essential ' GrallcB.' 



"They may be in a sense grallatorial, but are not really so, as we 

 shall see, if we work out their mixed affinities. 



" The Hemijpodii (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 Biduneulus and the dwarf Ground-Pigeons {ChamcBpelia). \ 



" 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 httle 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. 



" I have now merely to speak of the Tinamous ; and in their ease 

 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 biids, 

 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 StrutUonidce, 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. 



" It 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 Pluvialince 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. 



" I had 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- 



