| OCR Text |
Show 312 DR. H. GADOW ON THE INTESTINAL [May 21, extreme length of their gut thrown into numerous straight and oblique, or quite irregular, convolutions renders comparison very difficult. They have probably branched off very early from the main orthoccelous stock in the Antarctic region, and thus have had time to assume, through intense specialization, those pseudoprimitive characters in their whole organization which now separate the few surviving forms from the rest of the birds. The Lamellirostres, to which belongs Palamedea as a probably very old member, are all orthoccelous, and combine peri- and plagioccelous characters in their second loop. The five or six principal loops are alternating ; the last four are closed and straight. As typically orthoccelous, aquatic birds, and as Praecoces, they agree of course with the Pygopodes, and the root of the stock of the Lamellirostres has to be looked for in this direction alone; they form, however, such a homogeneous, principally herbivorous, group, that they claim subordinal rank for themselves. The Pelargi, containing the Hemiglottides (Lbis and Platalea), Phcenicopterus, and the Ciconiee, are rather diverging forms, which can be characterized as possessing four very long and mostly closed loops (with occasional secondary loops intercalated), of which the first three or some of them have a tendency to coil their apical ends up into a more or less irregular spiral; this leads sometimes to an almost mesogyrous formation. The Hemiglottides approach nearest to the Limicolae, although their points of resemblance with Numenius may possibly be cases of convergence only. Very closely allied to, in fact inseparable from, the Hemiglottides, and connecting them with Tantalus, and thus with the Ciconiae proper, is Phcenicopterus; there is not one single feature in the whole of the digestive system in which this bird differs from the Pelargi and resembles the Lamellirostres, except in the presence of small but functional caeca, which are nearly lost in the Pelargi. But these caeca stand in direct relation to the food of the Flamingoes, which consists of the confervse in the mud of the lagoons. The zoophagous Pelargi have lost them, the phytophagous Flamingoes have preserved them. The Ciconiinae proper, represented by Ciconia, and connected with the former genera by Tantalus, are essentially telogyrous; their second loop is right-handed, and accompanies the duodenum ; this is a rare feature, but considering that it occurs again only in the Gallinaceous group, and in some of their further allies, it must have been acquired independently by the Storks. It is of taxonomie value for the diagnosis of the subfamilies of the Pelargi. The Pelargi are often classed with the Herodii, but these two families differ from each other in almost every point of primary importance. Since, however, each of them possesses various points in common with the Steganopodes, whilst they differ from each other in these same points, we have to conclude that the Pelargi, Herodii, and Steganopodes are three equivalent groups, which are distantly allied to each other, the relations between the two latter being closer than those of either with the Pelargi. |
