Page:EB1911 - Volume 20.djvu/345

TAXONOMY] second edition is best. In 1828 Fleming brought out his History of British Animals (8vo), in which the birds are treated at considerable length (pp. 41-146), though not with great success. In 1835 Mr Jenyns (afterwards Blomefield) produced as excellent Manual of British Vertebrate Animals, a volume (8vo) executed with great scientific skill, the birds again receiving due attention (pp. 49-286), and the descriptions of the various species being as accurate as they are terse. In the same year began the Coloured Illustrations of British Birds and their Eggs of H. L. Meyer (4to), which was completed in 1843, whereof a second edition (7 vols. 8vo, 1842–1850) was brought out, and subsequently (1852–1857) a reissue of the latter. In 1836 appeared Eyton’s History of the rarer British Birds, intended as a sequel to Bewick’s well-known volumes, to which no important additions had been made since the issue of 1821. The year 1837 saw the beginning of two remarkable works by Macgillivray and Yarrell respectively, and each entitled A History of British Birds. Of Yarrell’s work in three volumes, a second edition was published in 1845, a third in 1856, and a fourth, begun in 1871, and almost wholly rewritten. Of the compilations based upon this work, without which they could not have been composed, there is no need to speak. One of the few appearing since, with the same scope, that are not borrowed is Jardine’s Birds of Great Britain and Ireland (4 vols. 8vo, 1838–1843), forming part of his Naturalist’s Library; and Gould’s Birds of Great Britain has been already mentioned. The local works on English birds are too numerous to be mentioned; almost every county has had its ornithology recorded. Of more recent general works there should be mentioned A. G. Butler’s British Birds with their Nests and Eggs (6 vols., 1896), the various editions of Howard Saunders’s Manual of British Birds, and Lord Lilford’s beautifully illustrated Coloured Figures of the Birds of the British Islands (1885–1897).

Taxonomy.

The good effects of “Faunal” works such as those named in the foregoing rapid survey none can doubt, but important as they are, they do not of themselves constitute ornithology as a science; and an inquiry, no less wide and far more recondite, still remains. By whatever term we choose to call it—Classification, Arrangement, Systematizing or Taxonomy—that inquiry which has for its object the discovery of the natural groups into which birds fall, and the mutual relations of those groups, has always been one of the deepest interest. It is now for us to trace the rise of the present more advanced school of ornithologists, whose labours yet give signs of far greater promise.

It would probably be unsafe to place its origin further back than a few scattered hints contained in the “Pterographische Fragmente” of Christian Ludwig Nitzsch, published in the Magazin für den neuesten Zustand der Naturkunde (edited by Voigt) for May 1806 (xi. pp. 393–417), and even these might be left to pass unnoticed, were it not that we recognize

in them the germ of the great work which the same admirable zoologist subsequently accomplished. In these “Fragments,” apparently his earliest productions, we find him engaged on the subject with which his name will always be especially identified, the structure and arrangement of feathers. In the following year another set of hints—of a kind so different that probably no one then living would have thought it possible that they should ever be brought in correlation with those of Nitzsch—are contained in a memoir on Fishes contributed to the tenth volume of the Annales

du Museum d’histoire naturelle of Paris by Étienne Geoffroy St-Hilaire in 1807. Here we have it stated as a general truth (p. 100) that young birds have the sternum formed of five separate pieces—one in the middle, being its keel, and two “annexes” on each side to which the ribs are articulated—all, however, finally uniting to form the single “breast-bone.” Further on (pp. 101, 102) we find observations as to the number of ribs which are attached to each of the “annexes”—there being sometimes more of them articulated to the anterior than to the posterior, and in certain forms no ribs belonging to one, all being applied to the other. Moreover, the author goes on to remark that in adult birds trace of the origin of the sternum from five centres of ossification is always more or less indicated by sutures, and that, though these sutures had been generally regarded as ridges for the attachment of the sternal muscles, they indeed mark the extreme points of the five primary bony pieces of the sternum.

In 1810 appeared at Heidelberg the first volume of F. Tiedemann’s carefully-wrought Anatomie und Naturgeschichte der Vögel—which shows a remarkable advance upon the work which Cuvier did in 1805, and in some respects is superior to his later production of 1817. It is, however, only noticed here on account of the numerous references

made to it by succeeding writers, for neither in this nor in the author’s second volume (not published until 1814) did he propound any systematic arrangement of the Class. More germane to our present subject are the Osteographische Beiträge zur Naturgeschichte der Vögel of C. L. Nitzsch, printed at Leipzig in 1811—a miscellaneous set of detached essays on some

peculiarities of the skeleton or portions of the skeleton of certain birds—one of the most remarkable of which is that on the component parts of the foot (pp. 101-105) pointing out the aberration from the ordinary structure exhibited by the Goatsucker (Caprimulgus) and the Swift (Cypselus)—an aberration which, if rightly understood, would have conveyed a warning to those ornithological systematists who put their trust in birds’ toes for characters on which to erect a classification, that there was in them more of importance, hidden in the integument, than had hitherto been suspected; but the warning was of little avail, if any, till many years had elapsed. However, Nitzsch had not as yet seen his way to proposing any methodical arrangement of the various groups of birds, and it was not until some eighteen months later that a scheme of classification in the main anatomical was attempted.

This scheme was the work of Blasius Merrem, who, in a communication to the Academy of Sciences of Berlin on the 10th December 1812, which was published in its Abhandlungen for the following year (pp. 237–259), set forth a Tentamen systematis naturalis avium, no less modestly entitled than modestly executed. The attempt of Merrem must

be regarded as the virtual starting-point of the latest efforts in Systematic Ornithology, and in that view its proposals deserve to be stated at length. Without pledging ourselves to the acceptance of all its details—some of which, as is only natural, cannot be sustained with our present knowledge—it is certainly not too much to say that Merrem’s merits are almost incomparably superior to those of any of his predecessors. Premising then that the chief characters assigned by this systematist to his several groups are drawn from almost all parts of the structure of birds, and are supplemented by some others of their more prominent peculiarities, we present the following abstract of his scheme:—