Nos. 451-452.] NOTES AND LITERATURE. 



597 



references. The accounts of the orders and famiUes have been 

 largely rewritten, and include references to extra-limital groups so 

 that the relationships of North American birds to foreign groups is 

 more clearly brought out. Most of the old illustrations have been 

 retained, and over two hundred new ones have been prepared for 

 this edition by Fuertes. Old admirers of the Key will probably 

 rejoice to see the old familiar cuts, absurdly inadequate or useless as 

 many of them were, and now cruelly contrasted with Fuertes' brilliant 

 work. 



The great influence which Coues' Key exercised on the ornithol- 

 ogists of the past generation is well known, and it is gratifying to 

 see his work brought as nearly as possible up to date, and its capa- 

 city for usefulness thus prolonged. It was always a bulky book, and 

 now, in its present form, it cannot serve as a manual ; it must yield 

 the field to later excellent " Keys." But it may still rank as one of 

 the most valuable works on the reference shelf, especially to those 



On^e is curious, however, with regard to this work of Fuertes, to 

 know whether it represents that artist's earlier or later style. In 

 some of it his worst faults in bird portraiture are too prominent. In 

 his drawing of the Mountain Chickadee (p. 271) in his efforts to show 

 the plumpness of a vigorous bird, the artist has given us an absurd 

 little caricature. 



R. H. 



Boulenger on the Classification of Bony Fishes.— The most im- 

 portant recent contribution to the taxonomy of fishes is " A Synopsis 

 of the Suborders and Families of Teleostean Fishes," by Dr. G. A. 

 Boulenger of the British Museum, published in the Anna/s ami Mag- 

 azine of Natural History for March, 1904. It is based on his own 

 studies of the fish skeletons in the British Museum and on the work 

 of Woodward, Gill, Jordan, Starks and Regan. The special effort 

 has been to show the relation of the different members of this great 

 group of nearly 12,000 species by a classification based on our 

 knowledge of phylogeny. The result of Dr. Boulenger's work is 

 not essentially different in fact from that of Dr. Gill, although there 

 is considerable divergence in nomenclature. Dr. Gill has preferred 

 to isolate aberrant groups until their true relationship is known. As 

 a result he has recognized twice as many families and twice as many 

 orders as Boulenger, many of these families and orders being pro- 

 visional. The advantage of this method lies in clear definition. The 



