. Animal Life and the World of Nature; A magazine of Natural History. THE IDENTIFICATION OF BIRDS. PAKT I. By F. Finn, ,, Fig. 1. KIWI, OE APTERYX. THE exact relationship of the various natural families of birds to each other has been long a matter of discussion among scientists, and will probably continue to be so. But the limits of the families themselves are well agreed ujjon, and it only remains to give for these brief diagnoses so that they may be readily recognised by external and easily appreciable characters. This task Dr. P. Chalmers Mitchell and I embarked upon together, b
. Animal Life and the World of Nature; A magazine of Natural History. THE IDENTIFICATION OF BIRDS. PAKT I. By F. Finn, ,, Fig. 1. KIWI, OE APTERYX. THE exact relationship of the various natural families of birds to each other has been long a matter of discussion among scientists, and will probably continue to be so. But the limits of the families themselves are well agreed ujjon, and it only remains to give for these brief diagnoses so that they may be readily recognised by external and easily appreciable characters. This task Dr. P. Chalmers Mitchell and I embarked upon together, but when it was about half completed the appointment of my coadjutor to the Secretaryship of the Zoological Society prevented from working further together, and so I am reluctantly compelled to finish it alone, as Dr. Mitchell's multifarious duties preclude any further co-operation. The real difficulty in assigning any bird to its proper family lies in the great number of these families, which never have been, and perhaps never will be, satisfactorily combined into large "orders" such as accommodate the groups of families in mammals and reptiles. For the old arrangement of perchers, swimmers, and so forth has long ago been found to be unnatural, combining under certain broad resemblances of structure and habit families of birds which were really essentially different. These families themselves, however, are not really hard to determine, and when they are once learnt any scheme for their combination into "orders" is more readily mastered. The points to which attention will especially be drawn are the situation of the nostrils and the extent of the gape of the mouth, and the scaling and webbing of the feet, points which hitherto have been rather too much neglected by ornithologists, both from a scientific and practically diagnostic point of view. Other p lints will of course be introduced when necessary, but bill and feet will separate most families of bird
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