337 
BIRDS WITH TEETH. 
Br HENRY WOODWARD, F.R.S., F.G.S., Etc. 
OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM. 
[PLATE CXXY . ] 
O NE of the greatest difficulties which the systematic natu- 
ralist meets with in the examination of the fauna of a 
new country is that his old ideas of classification are per- 
petually shaken by contact with new and strange life-forms, 
whose places are the more hard to fix in proportion to the pro- 
crustean character of the system into which he strives to fit 
them. 
Nor can he escape from the dilemma by refusing to admit 
them altogether, like Dr. Shaw in the days of old, who (so 
the story goes), on finding a shell, not described in Linnseus’s 
44 Systema Naturae,” gave it a rap with his hammer and brushed 
it away ! 
But, great as are his difficulties, they are light compared 
with those \yhich the palaeontologist encounters as he exhumes 
the fragmentary relics of bygone faunas, and strives by the 
help of existing organisms to rehabilitate the crumbling re- 
mains of a former world. For he knows that the vast assem- 
blage of living forms which he sees around him to-day have 
sprung, by descent, from the earlier life of the past, and that 
consequently no system of classification can be deemed complete 
unless it embrace both Neozoic and Palaeozoic faunas, linking 
together in one wide and comprehensive scheme the living 
present with the dead and far-off past. 
In striving to attain to this much-to-be-desired classification, 
however, a serious obstacle arises from our very imperfect 
knowledge of the greater number of extinct animals, espe- 
cially those belonging to the higher forms. Of their soft 
parts we can know but very little, whilst with the skeleton itself 
we are, as a rule, only able to attain to a very imperfect 
acquaintance. There is perhaps no order of animals to which 
these remarks apply with greater force than to that of Birds. 
VOL. XIV. — NO. LYII. Z 
