23 [Vol. xxxvi. 



Much harm is done by eggs bought from unreliable 

 dealers, or eggs collected by unreliable persons in the field. 

 Wrongly identified eggs do more harm than good, but un- 

 fortunately there are many in the hands of collectors who 

 buy them from dealers, and many in the collections of the 

 British Museum and of Adolph Nehrkorn — the two largest 

 general collections of eggs. It is important with unknown 

 eggs that the parent bird should be collected, and in order 

 that these birds may later on be available as proofs of the 

 identity of eggs, this should be clearly indicated on the 

 labels. We fix, in the Museum at Tring, a blue label to the 

 skin of a parent bird of which we have the eggs^ so that 

 it can easily be found afterwards. This is in many cases 

 as important as the red type-labels, which^ unfortunately, so 

 far as I know, only the U.S. National and the Tring 

 Museums have introduced^ an example which, however, 

 should be followed by every museum in the world. 



Mr. Pycraft : In the first place I cannot help feeling 

 that Mr. Jourdain^s notions of classification, and the 

 generally accepted notions of classification, are not quite 

 on all fours. I gather from his remarks that classification, 

 to him^ is but a mechanical process of " sorting out." 



But if classification is to be of any permanent value it 

 must express the genetic relationship, not only of species, 

 but of the larger groups_, one to another, so far as this is 

 possible. I fail, therefore, to see that eggs can be of any 

 great value from this larger point of view. Nothing he has 

 said to-'uight tends to show that they are. In certain cases 

 it may be established that the characters of the eggs are 

 correlated with somatological characters, but in themselves 

 the shells of eggs can afford but a very indiflferent guide to 

 the systematist. It is not quite correct to say that Garrod 

 founded a classification on the ambiens muscle, because he 

 used this in conjunction with a number of other thigh- 

 musclesj and characters furnished by the feet. 



If we are to make a really scientific classification we must — - 

 and this is now generally admitted — take a large number of 

 " factors " into consideration. Some, such as the condition 

 of the young at birth, the shape of the wings and beak, the 



