JAMES NEWTON BASKETT. 93 
Towhees well justify the tendency of Prof. Baird and others 
to assign distinct generic names to each group. The re- 
semblance between the eggs of some Wrens and some 
Thrashers is more striking than the external resemblances 
between the birds. 
It is not claimed, however, that any of this testimony is 
more than collateral or slightly confirmatory, nor that defi- 
nite diagnoses can be based on egg-resemblances ; but that 
the many complex sources from which some of our groups 
have sprung, can in many instances—sometimes in the 
clutch of an individual—be perceived in the eggs; that 
great variations in markings, shape, texture, and tint, often 
indicate either or both a variety of kinships or a multiplicity 
of routes up through which either the bird or the egg has 
come. The subject is full of uncertainties and difficulties, 
because of the extent of these relationships and their con- 
sequent intricacies. From the standpoint of the bird alone 
our avifauna is a stock of remnants, a chain with many 
“ missing links,” a series of survivals full of reversions as 
well as developments; so that it is doubtful if any scale can 
ever be drawn that will represent true relationships. The 
writer undertook one once for a class before which he was 
lecturing ; but he was younger then than he is now. By 
taking the morphology of any group of organs the thing 
may be approximated ; but on that line only, for a high de- 
velopment of one organ does not imply a high development 
of others. So when the sternum leads one way, the vomer 
another, the feet a third, the beak a fourth, the pattern of 
the feathering a fifth, and altricial and precocial relations a 
sixth, with naked or downy young when hatched hinting a 
‘seventh, leg-muscles an eighth, toe-tendons a ninth, and all 
the shaping of parts by adaptation and its concomitants, the 
tendencies of habit and inheritance, hint others ad injinitum, 
the way is far from clear; and if odlogy can shed the faintest 
glimmer upon the dim trail it should not be despised. 
Dependent on some of these, independent of others, and 
