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TAXONOMY] (1) Tetraonomorphae, comprising 2 families, the sand-grouse (Pterocles) and the grouse proper, among which the Central American Oreophasis finds itself; (2) Phasianomorphae, with 4 families, pheasants, peacocks, turkeys, guinea fowls, partridges, quails, and hemipodes (Turnix); (3) Macronyches, the megapodes, with 2 families; (4) the Duodecimpennatae, the curassows and guans, also with 2 families; (5) the Struthioniformes, composed of the tinamous; and (6) the Subgrallatores with 2 families, one consisting of the curious South American genera Thinocorus and Attagis and the other of the sheathbill (Chionis). The fifth order (the third of the Dasypaedes) is formed by the Grallatores, divided into 2 “series”—(1) Altinares, consisting of 2 “cohorts,” Herodii with 1 family, the herons, and Pelargi with 4 families, spoonbills, ibises, storks, and the umbre (Scopus), with Balaeniceps; (2) Humilinares, also consisting of 2 “cohorts,” Limicolae with 2 families, sandpipers and snipes, stilts and avocets, and Cursores with 8 families, including plovers, bustards, cranes, rails, and all the other “waders.” The sixth order, Natatores, consists of all the birds that habitually swim and a few that do not, containing 6 “cohorts”: Longipennes and Pygopodes with 3 families each; Totipalmatae with 1 family; Tubinares with 3 families; Impennes with 1 family, penguins; and Lamellirostres with 2 families, flamingoes and ducks. The seventh order, Proceres, is divided into 2 “cohorts”—Veri with 2 families, ostriches and emeus; and Subnobiles, consisting of the genus Apteryx. The eighth order is formed by the Saururae.

Later systems of classification owe much to anatomy, and the pioneers in the modern advances in this respect were A. H. Garrod and W. A. Forbes, two brilliant and short-lived young men who occupied successively the post of prosector to the Zoological Society of London, and who made a rich use of the material provided by the collection

of that society. Garrod was the more skilled and ingenious anatomist, Forbes had a greater acquaintance with the ornithology of museums and collectors. Garrod founded his system (1874) on muscular anatomy, making the two major divisions of Aves (his Homalogonatae and Anomalogonatae, depend in the first instance on the presence or absence of a peculiar muscular slip in the leg, known as the ambiens, although indeed he expressly stated that this was not on account of the intrinsic importance of the muscle in question, but because of its invariable association with other peculiarities. The system of Forbes was reconstructed after his death from notebook jottings, and neither Garrod nor Forbes have left any permanent mark on the classification of birds, although the material they furnished and the lines they indicated have proved valuable in later hands. In 1880 Dr P. L. Sclater published in the Ibis a classification which was mainly a revision of the system of Huxley, modified by the investigations of Garrod and Forbes and by his own large acquaintance with museum specimens.

In the article “Ornithology” in the ninth edition of this encyclopaedia, A. Newton accepted the three subclasses of Huxley, Saururae, Ratitae and Carinitae, and made a series of cautious but critical observations on the minor divisions of the Carinates. In 1882 A. Reichenow in Die Vögel der zoologischen Gärten published a classification of birds with a phylogenetic tree. In this he departed considerably from the lines that had been made familiar by English workers, and made great use of natural characteristics. The next attempt of importance appeared in the American Standard Natural History, published in Boston in 1885. The volume on birds was written by Dr L. Stejneger and was founded on Elliot Coues’s Key to North American Birds. Apart from its intrinsic merits as a learned and valuable addition to classification, this work is interesting in the history of ornithology because of the wholesale changes of nomenclature it introduced as the result of much diligence and zeal in the application of the strict rule of priority to the names of birds.

In 1888 there was published the huge monograph by Max Fürbringer entitled Untersuchungen zur Morphologie und Systematik der Vögel. In addition to an enormous body of new information chiefly on the shoulder girdle, the alar muscles and the nerve plexuses of birds, this work contained a critical and descriptive summary of practically the whole pre-existing literature on the structure of birds, and it is hardly necessary for the student of ornithology to refer to earlier literature at first hand. Fürbringer supposes that birds must have begun with toothed forms of small or moderate size, with long tails and four lizard-like feet and bodies clothed with a primitive kind of down. To these succeeded forms where the down had developed into body feathers for warmth, not flight, whilst the fore-limbs had become organs of prehension, the hind-limbs of progression. In such bipedal creatures the legs and pelvis became transformed to a condition similar to that of Dinosaurian reptiles. Many of them were climbing animals, and from these true birds with the power of flight were developed. In the course of this evolution there were many cases of arrest or degradation, and one of the most novel of the ideas of Fürbringer, and one now accepted by not a few anatomists, was that the ratites or ostrich-like birds were not a natural group but a set of stages of arrested development or of partial degradation. It is impossible to reproduce here Fürbringer’s elaborate details and phylogenetic trees with their various horizontal sections, but the following tables give the main outlines:—