fill Iff I 



t |1 VV li 





The Alciformes, arranged in the order of the A. O. U. Case XXI, Drawer 12, Annex. 



Note that the group /Ethiina? as defined by the A. O. U. includes the last egg in the top row, all in the 



second and all in the third, save the last one. 



scale. Such characters have, of course, been scrutinized in turn by the careful 

 taxonomists, and differences in plumage, or relative proportions of bill and feet, 

 differences in special structures, or in muscular or splanchnic equipment, have deter- 

 mined the various stages of classification from subspecies back to orders. The 

 anatomist, however, paying attention to the bird alone, has always been handicapped 

 for lack of a measuring rod, an outside test, a quasi independent criterion. At the best 

 he has never had a concomitant element, or time scale, remotely comparable to that 

 of the bony structure. As a result, an association of similarities has always deceived 

 him, or at least baffled him. With a single evidence of discordance at hand as between 

 two birds, he attaches either too much or too little significance to it, and he never 

 knows which. 



The helpless plight of the taxonomist is nowhere more clearly manifest than 

 in the case of the Alciformes, the Murre-Ank-Guillemot group. The Alciformes, 

 viewed anatomically, are a closely homogeneous group. The distinctions so far deter- 

 mined are mostly superficial, and so far indecisive that one authority (Ogilvy- Grant) 

 can group Auks, Dovekies, Murrelets, and Guillemots together as Alcinae, and. 

 Auklets with Puffins as Fraterculinae; while another authority, viz., the A. O. U. Com- 

 mittee, not only breaks up the latter group into Fraterculinae and iEthiinae, but 

 transfers the Murrelets and the Guillemots to this new-formed sub-group, the 

 iEthiinae. Coues (Key, 5th Edition) does no better, though he calls this sub- 

 group Phaleridinae. The characters assigned in either instance are of the utmost 

 degree of superficiality, having to do with the shape of inner claws or the shape 

 and relative degree of feathering of nostrils, etc. However characterized, probably 

 no more heterogeneous assemblage of an equal number of species (viz., fourteen 

 on the A. O. U. list) exists in nomenclature today, than this same sub-family 

 iEthiinae, as denned by the A. O. U. Committee. It contains three perfectly dis- 

 tinct groups in its own right, and has plundered one species, viz., Cerorhinca mono- 

 cerata, from its neighbors, the Fraterculinae. The evidence against this taxonomic 

 mongrel, the iEthiinae, as against all the taxonomic indecision or blundering which 

 has misrepresented the Alciformes for generations, lies with the egg. The egg, then, 

 shall be a court of last appeal. 



The evidence in this case is so simple, and to an unprejudiced observer so con- 

 vincing, that all one has to do is to present an orderly rearrangement of the eggs 

 of the Alciformes. Phylogenetic differences, which have been obscured or entirely 



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