I recommend fasting for three days and the application of a scourge thrice in the twenty-four hours! Do this, and about the fourth day you will perceive that the cranial differences alone are as great as those between Cathartes and Serpentarius.
If you want to hear something new and true it is this:—
1. That Memora is more unlike all the other Passerines (i.e. Coracomorphae) than they are unlike one another, and that it will have to stand in a group by itself.
It is as much like a wren as you are—less so, in fact, if you go on maintaining that preposterous fiction about Serpentarius.
2. Wood-peckers are more like crows than they are like cuckoos.
Aegithognathae.
Coracomorphae.
Desmognathae.
*Cypselomorphae.—Coccygomorphae.—*Gecinomorphae.
[*Shown on a horizontal line between Coracomorphae and Desmognathae.]
3. Sundevell is the sharpest fellow who has written on the classification of birds.