Book Description

Excerpt from Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, 1905, Vol. 48: Quarterly Issue I have taken no notice of the numerous new terms concerning the arrangement of the feathers proposed by Alix (1864, p. Wray (1887, pp. 344 - 345) and others, the older divisions into hand remiges and arm - remiges being quite sufficient for my purpose. It was to be foreseen that the treatment of such brittle and hard material as the horny substance of feathers would present serious technical difficulties. Former investigators have left no record of the way in which their examinations on developed feathers were conducted. It is true that Strong (1902, pp. 148 - 1 51) has described his mode of procedure rather fully, but he speaks merely of the treatment of feather germs. I treated the material to be examined in the following manner: I took one of the three outermost hand - remiges, usually the longest, and one of the arm-remiges of each Species of bird to be examined, and placed a portion of the vane on the Slide mounted in balsam. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.