No. 415.] POSITION OF THE ALOE: 543 
the affinities of birds, arrayed his Order IV, the Charadrii- 
formes, between his Ciconiiformes (Order III) and his sub- 
class Anomalogonate (Order I, Piciformes). The Charadrii- 
formes were made to contain two cohorts (a and £), namely, the 
. Columba and the Limicolz, the latter being represented by 
the Charadriidz, the Gruida, the Laridze, and the Alcidæ. 
When one considers the birds he grouped in his Ciconiiformes 
and his Piciformes, such a classification is surely to be regarded 
more in the light of a taxonomical curiosity than to be taken 
seriously as a contribution to the za£u7a/ classification of birds 
(cf. Proc. Zool. Soc., 1874, p. 116). 
As to the view entertained by Mr. W. A. Forbes on the 
position of the Alcz, I have a number of letters from him on 
the subject, written to me from London, just before he left on 
his fatal trip to Africa, in which this question is referred to 
and set forth. These will be published in another connection 
by the present writer, together with others on various scientific 
matters of interest. Forbes’s classification of birds was written 
out by him in his diary only four days before his death on the 
Niger, but it is more or less fragmentary, and I shall not dis- 
cuss it here (cf. /ézs, 1884, p. 119). 
Dr. P. L. Sclater, in his classification of birds, places the 
two families Colymbidz and Alcide as alone constituting the 
group Pygopodes (Order XXI), inserting them in his scheme 
between the Tubinares and Impennes (Orders XX and XXII, 
respectively). (See The Ibis for 1880.) This is certainly at 
variance with Professor Huxley’s views, though, as Dr. Sclater’s 
Order XIX (Gavize) includes only the Laridz, it agrees in 
one way with what Professor Huxley proposed, and that is, that 
the Laridze, the Procellaridz, the Colymbidz, and the Alcidae, 
grouped as families, were next nearest the penguins in their 
affinities, 
Dr. Reichenow (1882) surely did not appreciate the value of 
the osteological characters of the Impennes (penguins) when 
in his scheme of classification for Aves (Die Vögel der Zoolo- 
gischen Gärten) he placed the Spheniscidæ, the Alcidæ, and 
the Colymbidæ as the three families constituting his second 
order, the Urinatores. Such an arrangement distinctly differs 
