No. 414.] POSITION OF THE SCREAMERS. 461 
gallinaceous fowls. Such other characters as it may have in 
its skeleton, derived from ancestral representatives of still other 
groups, are now too completely masked and too obscure for us 
to decipher, especially as all of the near relatives of these birds 
have long ago died out, leaving no existing forms to assist us 
in the matter. Palamedea, then, is doubtless the survivor of an 
extremely ancient stock of birds, and were it positively known 
that the gallinaceous types and the Anseres sprang from a 
common stock, and it is not at all impossible, such birds as the 
screamers may have easily appeared close down at the branch- 
ing and then have ascended to the present time, showing but 
few structural changes in their organizations. 
Palamedea is a strong, vigorous, and eminently combative 
type of fowl, and one not calculated, in time, to have been 
much modified by its surroundings, and so has preserved in its 
morphology the major share of its archaic structure. 
I agree with Fürbringer that the screamers should be placed 
near the Anseres, but apart and in an independent group, 
standing between the latter and the ostrich types of birds. 
The Palamedez, in fact, constitute a suborder of birds 
(although represented but by three existing species) coequal 
in the matter of distinctness with a number of others that 
have been created in the class Aves, and, as a group, even 
better defined and more distinct than not a few others. It is 
fortunate for us indeed that in their anatomical structure there 
is so much that enables us to recognize as clearly as we can 
the place occupied in the system and in the class by these 
birds and to predict with such certainty what their relation- 
ships are with the other main groups of avian forms. 
WASHINGTON, D.C. 
