Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/37

 ORNITHOLOGY 27 other two is no doubt a misplacement, but the alliance of j Buceros to Upupa, already suggested by Gould and Blyth ; in 1838 1 (Mag. Nat. History, ser. 2, ii. pp. 422 and 589), | though apparently unnatural, has been corroborated by , many later systematizers; and taken as a whole the estab lishment of the PicariiR was certainly a commendable pro- ! ceeding. For the rest there is only one considerable change, and that forms the greatest blot on the whole scheme. Instead of recognizing, as before, a Subclass in ; the Ratitx of Merrem, Nitzsch now reduced them to the rank of an Order under the name &quot; Platystemse,&quot; placing them between the &quot; Gallinacex &quot; and &quot; Grallx&quot; though admitting that in their pterylosis they differ from all other Birds, in ways that he is at great pains to describe, in each of the four genera examined by him Stridhio, Rhea, Drommis, and Casuarius. 2 It is significant that notwith standing this he did not figure the pterylosis of any one of them, and the thought suggests itself that, though his editor assures us he had convinced himself that the group must be here shoved in (eingeschdben is the word used), the intrusion is rather due to the necessity which Nitzsch, in common with most men of his time (the Quinarians excepted), felt for deploying the whole series of Birds into line, in which case the proceeding may be defensible on the score of convenience. The extraordinary merits of this book, and the admirable fidelity to his principles which Prof. Burmeister shewed in the difficult task of editing it, were unfortunately overlooked for many years, and perhaps are not sufficiently recognized now. Even in Germany, the author s own country, there were few to notice seriously what is certainly one of the most remark able works ever published on the science, much less to pursue the investigations that had been so laboriously begun. 3 Andreas Wagner, in his report on the progress of Ornithology, as might be expected from such a man as he was, placed the Pterylographie at the summit of those publications the appearance of which he had to record for the years 1839 and 1840, stating that for &quot; Systematik &quot; it was of the greatest importance. 4 On the other hand Oken (/ .&amp;lt;, 1842, pp. 391-394), though giving a summary of Nitzsch s results and classification, was more sparing of his praise, and prefaced his remarks by asserting that he could not refrain from laughter when he looked at the plates in Nitzsch s work, since they reminded him of the plucked fowls hanging in a poulterer s shop it might as well be urged as an objection to the plates in many an anatomical book that they called to mind a butcher s and goes on to say that, as the author always had the luck to engage in researches of which nobody thought, so had he the luck to print them where nobody sought them. In Sweden 1 This association is one of the most remarkable in the whole series of Blyth s remarkable papers on classification in the volume cited above. He states that Gould suspected the alliance of these two forms &quot;from external structure and habits alone ;&quot; otherwise one might suppose that he had obtained an intimation to that effect on one of his Continental journeys. Blyth &quot; arrived at the same conclusion, however, by a different train of investigation,&quot; and this is beyond doubt. 2 He does not mention Apteryx, at that time so little known on the Continent. 3 Some excuse is to be made for this neglect. Nitzsch had of course exhausted all the forms of Birds commonly to be, obtained, and speci- | lueus of the less common forms were too valuable from the curator s or collector s point of view to be subjected to a treatment that might end in their destruction. Yet it is said, on good authority, that Nitzsch had the patience so to manipulate the skins of many rare species that he was able to ascertain the characters of their pterylosis by the inspec tion of their inside only, without in any way damaging them for the ordinary purpose of a museum. Nor is this surprising when we con sider the marvellous skill of Continental and especially German taxi dermists, many of whom have elevated their profession to a height of art inconceivable to most Englishmen, who are only acquainted with the miserable mockery of Nature which is the most sublime result of all but a few &quot; bird-stufters. &quot; 4 Archiv far Naturgeschickte, vii. 2, pp. 60, 61. Sundevall, without accepting Nitzsch s views, accorded them a far more appreciative greeting in his annual reports for 1840-42 (i. pp. 152-160); but of course in England and France 5 nothing was known of them beyond the scantiest notice, generally taken at second hand, in two or three publications. Thanks to Mr Sclater, the Ray Society was induced to publish, in 1867, an excellent translation by Mr Dallas of Nitzsch s Pterylography, and thereby, however tardily, justice was at length rendered by British ornithologists to one of their greatest foreign brethren. 6 The treatise of KESSLEK on the osteology of Birds feet, published Kessler. in tin; Built tin of the Moscow Society of Naturalists for 1841, next claims a few words, though its scope is rather to shew differences than affinities ; but treatment of that kind is undoubtedly useful at times in indicating that alliances generally admitted are unnatural ; and this is the case here, for, following Cuvier s method, the author s researches prove the artificial character of some of its associations. While furnishing almost unconsciously, however -additional evidence for overthrowing that classification, there is, nevertheless, no attempt made to construct a better one ; and the elaborate tables of dimensions, both absolute and pro portional, suggestive as is the whole tendency of the author s observations, seem not to lead to any very practical result, though the systematist s need to look beneath the integument, even in parts that are so comparatively little hidden as Birds feet, is once more made beyond all question apparent. It has already been mentioned that MACGILLIVRAY con- Macgil- tributed to Audubon s Ornithological Biography a series of hvray descriptions of some parts of the anatomy of American ^ , Birds, from subjects supplied to him by that enthusiastic i jon naturalist, whose zeal and prescience, it may be called, in this respect merits all praise. Thus he (prompted very likely by Macgillivray) wrote : &quot; I believe the time to be approaching when much of the results obtained from the inspection of the exterior alone will be laid aside ; when museums filled with stuffed skins will be considered insufficient to afford a knowledge of birds ; and when the student will go forth, not only to observe the habits and haunts of animals, but to preserve specimens of them to be carefully dissected &quot; (Ornith. Biography, iv., Introduc tion, p. xxiv). As has been stated, the first of this series of anatomical descriptions appeared in the fourth volume of his work, published in 1838, but they were continued until its completion with the fifth volume in the following year, and the whole vas incorporated into what may be termed its second edition, The Birds of America, which appeared between 1840 and 1844 (see p. 1 1). Among the many species whose anatomy Macgillivray thus partly described from autopsy were at least half a dozen 7 of those now referred to the Family Tyrannidx (see KING-BIRD, vol. xiv. p. 80), but then included, with many others, ac cording to the irrational, vague, and rudimentary notions of classification of the time, in what was termed the Family &quot; MuscicapiniR. &quot; In all these species he found the vocal organs to differ essentially in structure from those of other Birds of the Old World, which we now call Passerine, or, to be still more precise, Oscinian. But by him these last were most arbitrarily severed, dissociated from their allies, and wrongly combined with other forms by no means nearly related to them (Brit. Birds, i. pp. IT, 18) which 5 In lS36J.CQri-:Miy communicated to the French Academy (Comptes Itendus, ii. pp. 374, 375, and 472&quot;) some observations on the order in which feathers are disposed on the body of Birds ; but, however general may have been the scope of his investigations, the portion of them published refers only to the Crow, and there is no mention made of Nitzsch s former work. 6 The Ray Society had the good fortune to obtain the ten original copper-plates, all but one drawn by the author himself, wherewith the work was illustrated. It is only to be regretted that the Society did not also stick to the quarto size in which it appeared, for by issuing their English version in folio they needlessly put an impediment in the way of its common and convenient use. 7 These are, according to modern nomenclature, Tyranmis caroU- nensis and (as before mentioned) T. vcrticalis, Mijiarchus crinilus, Sciyornis fuscus, C onto pus virens, and Empidonax acadicus.