THE AMERICAN NATURALIST. [Vol. XXXVIII. 



exhaustive, being accompanied by several vertical aspects and 

 horizontal projections of his phylogenetic tree. Indeed, the 

 objection brought against Furbringer's classification, principally 

 by Gadow, is that it is too long and too elaborate for practical 

 use. I do not fully concur in this opinion ; moreover its author 

 has, in many groups carried us a long way on the road toward 

 determining the true relationships of birds and that, I take it, is 

 the real goal we seek. In fact the converse of this would be 

 an easy matter, that is to create a brief, artificial classification 

 of birds based upon our present knowledge of the class, and 

 adapted to the practical ends of the science. Any international 

 congress of ornithologists, representatives from all parts of the 

 world, could, in a few days, prepare such a scheme. But the 

 problem is not to be settled in any such manner. 



As it is we find hardly any more uniformity with respect 

 to the schemes proposed by Stejneger, Furbringer, Cope, See- 

 bohm, Sharpe and Gadow, than is to be found among those of 

 Huxley, Newton, Garrod, Forbes, Sclater, Reichenow, and others. 



The majority of these schemes carry the classification down 

 through the families, and, in special cases, in a few instances in 

 each, through the sub-families. Huxley did not give the num- 

 ber of families in the Passeres, Garrod omitted the group 

 entirely in his scheme ; Sclater enumerated thirty-one of them ; 

 Reichenow but twenty-one ; Stejneger thirty-three ; Furbringer 

 reduced the typical Passeres to one single family, the Passeridse ; 

 in 1889 the present writer recognized twenty families of the 

 North American Passeres, and Sharpe the following year 

 practically adopting the scheme, included all the old world 

 representatives, and by so doing admitted thirty-five families as 

 making up the passerine group, — and so on. 



There is little need of carrying such comparisons as these 

 into the higher divisions into which birds have been divided. 

 We would but meet with greater variance of opinions, made 

 the more deplorable from the fact that the wealth of coinage in 

 new names renders the comparisons instituted even more per- 

 plexing. Then this perplexity is in no way diminished when a 

 taxonomer takes it into his head to incorporate all the known 

 fossil forms of birds into his scheme, as quite a number have 

 done, and, very properly so. 



