92 R- W. SHUFELDT. 



too often crept into the text-books, manuals and similiar works 

 on the subject. Many there were in those times who appeared 

 to beheve that a good description of a single skeleton of any 

 particular animal, adequately illustrated, was quite sufficient for 

 all time; others, too, seemed to entertain the idea that that de- 

 scription need only be of a form representative of the group, 

 and that we could take the osteology of its near allies for 

 granted. For example, if we had a good published account with 

 illustrations on plates and in text of an eagle, of a pigeon, 

 a perch, a deer and so on, that that was far enough to go in 

 any particular instance, and anything further would be super- 

 fluous, to say nothing of the needless labor and expense involved. 

 JNot a few have argued that, if we knew the osteology of the 

 main representative types, it was not necessary to compare 

 further; in some instances the osteology of the forms would be 

 so much alike that science would gain "'absolutely nothing" from 

 the information brought to fight. Sometimes one hears such 

 writers remark, for example, "why, if we have a complete 

 account of the skeleton of a gray squirrel, what earthly neces- 

 sity is there for elaborately describing the skeleton in a red 

 one — they are both squirrels?" This is an extremely dange- 

 rous principle to encourage, for when a writer comes to draw 

 upon the literature of comparative osteology for general text- 

 books on the subject, and the literature has thus been built up, 

 and where generalizations are made, such generalizations are 

 only too frequently very wide of the truth. Some of the most 

 distinguished authors in comparative anatomy have, in their 

 published works of a general nature, thus been led into the re- 

 cording of statements of the kind referred to, and they have 

 been accepted as correct by a far too great number of students 

 of the subject, both in times past and present. Not only this, 

 but as books are built up upon other books in the same field 

 of research, many of these errors are liable to be perpetuated, 

 and they often are so passed down through literature, to the 



