544 THE AMERICAN NATURALIST. [Vor. XXXV. 
from that of Huxley and others, and cannot be sustained 
upon morphological grounds, which are the only true ones 
to be considered in the natural classification of animals of 
any kind. Coues and Ridgway, as representative authorities 
of the American Ornithologists’ Union (1884-95), consider 
the Alcidæ to be a family of the order Pygopodes, arrayed 
with the Urinatoridz in a suborder, Cepphi. Why a grebe 
(4Echmophorus) and a puffin (Lunda) should, as birds, be 
associated in the same order, is quite beyond the compre- 
hension of the present writer, who believes that Professor 
Cope went equally wide of the mark when, in his classifi- 
catory scheme for Aves, he made an order, Euornithes, which 
is included in his superorder Eurhipidurz ; and in the former, 
the Alcida fall within the suborder Cecomorphe (cf. Amer. 
Nat., October, 1889). 
The late Professor William Kitchen Parker, in his admi- 
rable memoir On the Morphology of the Duck and Auk 
Tribes, says, on page 91: “I am under the impression that 
penguins never possessed quills, and that their adaptation to 
aquatic life and their great power of diving took place 
much earlier in their ancestral history than in the case of 
the auks and guillemots — birds that tend to become a sort 
of palearctic penguin but never quite lose the marks of 
their former adaptations to a more terrestrial life. I con- 
ceive of their ancestors in amphibious or limicolous birds, 
and I imagine the forefathers of gulls, plovers, rails — the 
auk tribe— as being very much alike and very nearly 
related. . . . All the penguins are alike in everything that 
is important; of the Alcidz only one, Alca impennts, became 
transformed into the likeness of-a penguin; the specializa- 
tion of the family has been imperfect as compared with the 
penguins, and, as I believe, took place later in time" (Cun- 
ningham Memoirs, No. VI, Royal Irish Academy, Dublin, 
November, 1890). 
A marked approach toward a natural classification of the 
several groups of birds I have been considering here was 
arrived at when Dr. Leonard Stejneger published his scheme 
in 1885 (Standard Natural History, Boston). In it the 
