No. 448.] 



CLASSIFICATION OF BIRDS. 



fication of Garrod, who it may be said, almost entirely ignored 

 Huxley's scheme by dividing the Class Aves into two subclasses 

 — the first containing four orders and the latter three, or in 

 other words two sub-classes and seven orders as compared with 

 the latter's three. Garrod's initial scheme of classification is not 

 thorough since we meet with such incongruities as the Cathartidae 

 being considered simply as a group in the same order with the 

 Steganopodes, herons and others, while the Columbidae and the 

 Gallinae are widely separated, and the penguins are placed as a 

 family among the Anseres, immediately following the Anatida?, or 

 the ducks, geese, swans and their allies. Still keeping before 

 us, however, the main divisions of the class it is to be noted 

 that ornithologists had little more than fairly grasped the Garro- 

 dian idea of avian relationships when in 1880, six years after its 

 publication, Sclater proposed another scheme. In it the Saururse 

 of Huxley are not considered, — the class is divided into two 

 subclasses, the Carnatae and Ratitae, the former containing no 

 fewer than twenty-three orders, and the latter three others, or 

 twenty-six orders of birds, where Huxley only recognized three ; 

 and these three orders Newton considers to be so many sub- 

 classes, while he would divide the Ratitje into no fewer than six 

 orders. These classifications were almost immediately followed 

 by Reichenow in 1882 who divided birds into seven main groups 

 which he called series, and these seven series were represented 

 by seventeen orders. It is very different indeed from any of 

 the foregoing schemes and cannot be contrasted with them with- 

 out great difficulty, while its chief interest lies in the fact that 

 be published in connection with it a phylogenetic tree of the 

 Class Aves, one of the first attempts of the kind employed in 

 ornithological science. 



Within the next ten years a number of important classifica- 

 tions followed, — all provisional schemes for the arrangement of 

 the Class, but none the less entitled to our best consideration, 

 coming as they have from the pens of the ablest living ornithol- 

 ogists. 



Stejneger's appeared in 1885; Fiirbringer's in 1888; Cope's 

 1889; Seebohm's in 1890; Sharpe's in 1891 ; and Gadow's 

 m 1892. Of all these Furbringer's is the most elaborate and 



