Alfred Newton and Peter Chalmers Mitchell

“ There is, it is true, a smoothness and finish about them not often seen elsewhere; but, as though to avoid the exaggerations of Audubon, Gould usually adopted the tamest of attitudes in which to represent his subjects, whereby expression as well as vivacity is wanting. Moreover, both in drawing and in colouring there is frequently much that is untrue to nature, so that it has not uncommonly happened for them to fail in the chief object of all zoological plates, that of affording sure means of recognizing specimens on comparison. ”

“ This Naturgeschichte der Vögel Deutschlands, being almost wholly rewritten by his son J. F. Naumann, is by far the best thing of the kind as yet produced in any country. The fulness and accuracy of the text, combined with the neat beauty of its coloured plates, have gone far to promote the study of ornithology in Germany, and while essentially a popular work, since it is suited to the comprehension of all readers, it is throughout written with a simple dignity that commends it to the serious and scientific. ”

“ They all grow slowly, and it is not until the animal is about six months old that they are united into one firm bone. The duck, on the other hand, when newly hatched, and for nearly a month after, has the sternum wholly cartilaginous. Then, it is true, two lateral points of ossification appear at the margin, but subsequently the remaining three are developed, and when once formed they grow with much greater rapidity than in the fowl, so that by the time the young duck is quite independent of its parents, and can shift for itself, the whole sternum is completely bony. ”

“ It is sufficient here to remark that the author, even then a man of great erudition, must have been aware of the turn which taxonomy was taking; but, not being able to divest himself of the older notion that external characters were superior to those furnished by the study of internal structure, and that Comparative Anatomy, instead of being a part of zoology, was something distinct from it, he seems to have endeavoured to form a scheme which, while not running wholly counter to the teachings of Comparative Anatomists, should yet rest ostensibly on external characters. ”

“ There is not a single plate that is unworthy of the greatest of all animal painters.
Proceeding to illustrated works generally of less pretentious size, but of greater ornithological utility than the books last mentioned, which are fitter for the drawing-room than the study, we next have to consider some in which the text is not wholly subordinated to the plates, though the latter still form a conspicuous feature of the publication. First of these in point of time as well as in importance is the Nouveau recueil des planches coloriées d'oiseaux of Temminck Temminck and Langier. ”

“ 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 would occupy more space than can here be allowed to give even the briefest abstract of the numerous observations which follow the statement of his theory and on which it professedly rests. They extend to more than a score of natural groups of birds, and nearly each of them presents some peculiar characters. Thus of the first series of pieces he says that when all exist they may be developed simultaneously, or that the two side-pieces may precede the median, or again that the median may precede the side-pieces—according to the group of birds, but that the second mode is much the commonest. ”

“ Nitzsch had of course exhausted all the forms of birds commonly to be obtained, and specimens 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 inspection of their inside only, without in any way damaging them for the ordinary purpose of a museum. ”

“ Belon, as has just been said, had a knowledge of the anatomy of birds, and he seems to have been the first to institute a direct comparison of their skeleton with that of man; but in this respect he only anticipated by a few years the more precise researches of Volcher Coiter, a Frisian, who in 1573 and 1575 published at Nuremberg two treatises, in one of which the internal structure of birds in general is very creditably described, while in the other the osteology and myology of certain forms is given in considerable detail, and illustrated by carefully drawn figures. ”

“ Paris very early in the 19th century. First in order of them is the Histoire naturelle d'une partie d'oiseaux nouveaux et rares de l'Amérique et des Indes, a folio volume [42] published in 1801 by Le Vaillant. This is devoted to the very distinct and not nearly-allied groups of horn bills and of birds which for want of a better name we must call “Chatterers,” and is illustrated, like those works of which a notice immediately follows, by coloured plates, done in what was then considered to be the highest style of art and by the best draughtsmen procurable. ”

“ The purely artificial character of the System of Linnaeus and his successors had been perceived, and men were at a loss to find a substitute for it. The new doctrine, loudly proclaiming the discovery of a “Natural” System, led away many from the steady practice which should have followed the teaching of Cuvier (though he in ornithology had not been able to act up to the principles he had lain down) and from the extended study of Comparative Anatomy. ”

“ A considerable number of birds are mentioned, and something said of almost each of them; but that something is too often nonsense according to modern ideas. The twenty-six books De Animalibus of Albertus Magnus (Groot) , printed in 1478, are founded mainly on Aristotle. The twenty-third of these books is De Avibus, and therein a great number of birds' names make their earliest appearance, few of which are without interest from a philologist's if not an ornithologist's point of view, but there is much difficulty in recognizing the species to which many of them belong. ”

“ From travellers who employ themselves in collecting the animals of any distant country the zoologists who stay at home and study those of their own district, be it great or small, are really not so much divided as at first might appear. Both may well be named “Faunists,” and of the latter there were not a few who having turned their attention more or less to ornithology should here be mentioned, and first among them Rzaczynski, who in 1721 brought out at Sandomirsk the Historia naturalis curiosa regni Poloniae, to which an Auctuarium was posthumously published at Danzig in 1742. ”

“ After several minor notices that appeared in journals at various times, Des Murs Des Murs. in 1860 brought out at Paris his ambitious Traité général d'oologie ornithologique au point de vue de la classification, which contains (pp. 529-538) a “Systema Oologicum” as the final result of his labours. In this scheme birds are arranged according to what the author considered to be their natural method and sequence; but the result exhibits some unions as ill-assorted as can well be met with in the whole range of tentative arrangements of the class, together with some very unjustifiable divorces. ”

“ We have already seen that De Blainville, though fully persuaded of the great value of sternal features as a method of classification, had been compelled to fall back upon the old pedal characters so often employed before; but now the scholar had learnt to excel his teacher, and not only to form an at least provisional arrangement of the various members of the Class, based on sternal characters, but to describe these characters at some length, and so give a reason for the faith that was in him. There is no evidence, so far as we can see, of his having been aware of Merrem's views ”

“ It is evident that the features of the sternum of which De Blainville chiefly relied were those drawn from its posterior margin, which no very extensive experience of specimens is needed to show are of comparatively slight value; for the number of “échancrures”—notches as they have sometimes been called in English—when they exist, goes but a very short way as a guide, and is so variable in some very natural groups as to be even in that short way occasionally misleading. ”

“ 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 Nitzsch. ”

“ Nitzsch's name was subsequently dismissed by Cuvier without a word of praise, and in terms which would have been applicable to many another and inferior author, while Temminck, terming Naumann's work an “ouvrage de luxe”—it being in truth one of the cheapest for its contents ever published—effectually shut it out from the realms of science. In Britain it seems to have been positively unknown until quoted some years after its completion by a catalogue-compiler on account of some peculiarities of nomenclature which it presented. ”

“ The common practice of ordinary collectors, until at least very recently, has been tersely described as being to “shoot a bird, take off its skin, and throw away its characters.” ↑ Perhaps this may be partially explained by the fact that the Museum of the College of Surgeons, in which these investigations were chiefly carried on, like most other museums of the time, contained a much larger series of the heads of birds than of their entire skeletons, or of any other portion of the skeleton. ”

“ In the ostrich and its allies no trace of this median centre of ossification ever occurs; but with these exceptions its existence is invariable in all other birds. Here the matter must be left; but it is undoubtedly a subject which demands further investigation, and naturally any future investigator of it should consult the abstract of L'Herminier's memoir and the criticisms upon it of the younger Geoffroy.
Hitherto our attention has been given wholly to Germany and France, for the chief ornithologists of Britain were occupying Macgillivray. ”

“ The principal theory which he hence conceived himself justified in propounding was that instead of five being (as had been stated) the maximum number of centres of ossification in the sternum, there are no fewer than nine entering into the composition of the perfect sternum of birds in general, though in every species some of these nine are wanting, whatever be the condition of development at the time of examination. ”

“ Illustrations in three volumes, containing one hundred and eighty-two plates, whereof seventy represent birds, appeared between 1820 and 1821, and in 1829 a second series of the same was begun by him, which, extending to another three volumes, contained forty-eight more plates of birds out of one hundred and thirty-six, and was completed in 1833. All the figures were drawn by the author, who as an ornithological artist had no rival in his time. Every plate is not beyond criticism, but his worst drawings show more knowledge of bird-life than do the best of his English or French contemporaries. ”

“ On two occasions, however, there was found in addition, what may be taken for a representation of the first series, a little “noyau” situated between the coracoids—forming the only instance of all three series being present in the same bird. As regards the ducks, L'Herminier agreed with Cuvier that there are commonly only two centres of ossification—the side-pieces of the middle series; but as these grow to meet one another a distinct median “noyau,” also of the same series, sometimes appears, which soon forms a connexion with each of them. ”

“ But, while the successive editions of Linnaeus's great work were revolutionizing natural history, and his example of precision in language producing excellent effect on scientific writers, several other authors were advancing the study of ornithology in a very different way—a way that pleased the eye even more than his labours were pleasing the mind. Between 1731 and 1743 Mark Catesby brought out in London his Natural History of Carolina—two large folios containing highly coloured plates of the birds of that colony, Florida and the Bahamas. ”

“ Impressed by the belief that verbosity was the bane of science, he carried terseness to an extreme which frequently created obscurity, and this in no branch of zoology more than in that which relates to birds. ”

“ The herons, for instance, are much more “Constrictipedes” than are the larks or the kingfishers, and, so far from the majority of “Inconstrictipedes” being polygamous, there is scarcely any evidence of polygamy obtaining as a habit among birds in a state of nature except in certain of the Gallinae and a very few others. Furthermore, the young of the goat suckers are at hatching far more developed than are those of the herons or the cormorants; and, in a general way, nearly every one of the asserted peculiarities of the two subclasses breaks down under careful examination. ”

“ 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 encyclopedia, 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. ”

“ His attempt at classification was certainly better than that of Linnaeus; and it is rather curious that the researches of the latest ornithologists point to results in some degree comparable with Brisson's systematic arrangement, for they refuse to keep the birds-of-prey at the head of the Class Aves, and they require the establishment of a much larger number of “Orders” than for a long while was thought advisable. Of such “Orders” Brisson had twenty-six and he gave pigeons and poultry precedence of the birds which are plunderers and scavengers. ”

“ Moreover, as Professor Burmeister states in his preface, Nitzsch by no means regarded the natural sequence of groups as the highest problem of the systematists, but rather their correct limitation. Again, the arrangement followed in the Pterylographie was of course based on pterylographical considerations, and we have its author's own word for it that he was persuaded that the limitation of natural groups could only be attained by the most assiduous research into the species of which they are composed from every point of view. ”

“ In 1773 P. L. S. Müller brought out at Nuremberg a German translation of the Systema Naturae, completing it in 1776 by a Supplement containing a list of animals thus described, which had hitherto been technically anonymous, with diagnoses and names on the Linnaean model. In 1783 Boddaert printed at Utrecht a Table des planches enluminéez, [24] in which he attempted to refer every species of bird figured in that extensive series to its proper Linnaean genus, and to assign it a scientific name if it did not already possess one. ”