306 

 ON THE BRITISH FRUIT-EATING WARBLKRS. 



BY EDWARD BLYTH. 



THERE is not, throughout the whole range of British ornithology, 

 a group of birds more easy to be divided into natural and well marked 

 genera than the warblers (Sylviana^, if a little attention only be 

 paid to the habits and structure of the living birds ; and yet there 

 is hardly a single group that has been at all times so incon- 

 gruously and unnaturally arranged. The huge genus Sylvia, as 

 adopted by M. Temminck, in which the aquatic warblers, the night- 

 ingales, the sylvan warblers, the robin and redstart, the bluebreast 

 (a bird which moves by walking, like the pipits and wagtails), the 

 willow-wrens, the gold-crests, the wrens, and a host of equally dis- 

 similar foreign groups were all lumped together under one generic 

 name, is now, I believe with almost universal consent, set aside, or 

 limited very properly to a real sylvan group, the birds commonly, 

 though xmmeaningly, called " willow- wrens ;" but still, though our 

 systematists have, in most instances, abandoned the old superficial 

 system of classification, and have endeavoured to comprise, under the 

 same generic name, those creatures only which assimilate in habits and 

 structure, as well as in a few trivial and arbitrary characters, they have 

 again confused, in subdividing the old genus Sylvia, three distinct and 

 very natural groups under the one name Curruca. 



All who have minutely studied the form, habits, and general 

 economy of this interesting group of birds, or who have kept the 

 different species in confinement, must allow, that if the willow-wrens 

 (Sylvia) are to constitute a separate genus from the other warblers, if 

 the field- wagtails (Budytes) are to be separated from the water- wag- 

 tails (Motacilla), or if the goldfinches arid siskins (Carduelis) are to 

 bear a different generic name from the linnets (Lin aria), by the same 

 rule, the aquatic warblers, the sylvan warblers, and the nightingales 

 should be distinguished from each other by diverse generic appellations. 

 " I cannot," says the Hon. and Rev. W. Herbert, in one of his 

 amusing notes to the late edition of White's Selborne, " close this note 

 without protesting against the injudicious manner in which the genus 

 Sylvia has been subdivided in the supplement of Shaw's Zoology. What 

 can be said in favour of a system that confines the name Sylvia to the 

 redbreast, the bluebreast, and two European redstarts, which have no 

 sylvan habits, and lumps the nightingale and all the aquatic warblers 

 with the fruit-eating-birds, under the name Curruca ? There is a 



