126 The Irish Naturalist. June, 



Barrington's collection is also Lanius major ; and More, in one of his 

 letters to Prof. Newton, since published, stated in 1885 that he had no 

 certain proof of the occurrence of any other form in Ireland (" Life and 

 Letters of A. G. More," p. 324). 



It must be added that Mr. Harting's information on the breeding- 

 ranges of birds in Ireland is lamentably defective. Mr. Ussher's 

 admirable Report on this subject, presented to the Royal Irish Academy 

 in 1894 (Proc, 3rd Ser., vol. iii., No. 3), would have sufficed to show him 

 that the Whinchat, Redstart, Garden-Warbler, Wood- Wren, Yellow 

 Wagtail, Woodlark, Tree Sparrow, Siskin, Crossbill, Jay, and Stock-dove 

 have been found nesting over a wider area than he supposes ; and the 

 information contained in that paper was further brought up-to-date by 

 an article on the same subject in the Irish Naturalist for March, 1897 ( v °l- 

 vi., pp. 64-73). 



Another serious fault is the number of doubtful and discredited Irish 

 records which Mr. Harting has allowed to retain their places unchallenged. 

 The Red-breasted Goose and Brunnich's Guillemot, long ago turned out 

 of our list by A. G. More, as well as the Reed Warbler and Ortolan, 

 rejected for substantial reasons by Mr. Ussher, reappear in Mr. Harting's 

 book without the slightest hint of their records being open to suspicion. 

 Birds which were originally recorded as having been seen are frequeutly 

 enumerated in words which might seem to imply that they had been 

 obtained, e.g., the White Wagtail alleged to have been observed near 

 Wexford (Zoo/., 1866, p. 95) ; and worse still, the " Ivory Gull " said to 

 have beeu seen in the heart of Dublin city, just above Grattan Bridge, 

 on April 19th, 1892 (Zoo/., 1892, p. 228). Mr. Warren pointed out at the 

 time that no weight could be attached to this statement, as the bird was 

 not obtained; and the present writer remembers that a white- mantled 

 specimen of the common Larus ridilmndus had frequented that part of the 

 Liffey not long prior to the date specified for the " Ivory Gull." 



The re-publication of these discredited stories would be no fault, but the 

 reverse, if the doubts attaching to them had also been stated. Mr. 

 Harting has included in his Part II. a notice of the American Goldfinch 

 shot by Mr. Sheridan in Achill Island on September 6th, 1894, and here 

 he concisely gives his reasons for believing that it had escaped from 

 captivity, " probably from the deck of some homeward-bound vessel from 

 America." Mr. Ussher, in " The Birds of Ireland," ignores the American 

 Goldfinch altogether, but in this instance it seems to us that Mr. 

 Harting has adopted the wiser course. So long as the grounds for 

 suspecting error are stated, no harm is done by quoting particulars of 

 the occurrence, and several useful objects are gained by it. The most 

 important of these is the illustration of the diversity of the sources of 

 error, against which the student of ornithology cannot be too repeatedly 

 cautioned. Besides, the ignoring of a doubtful record by naturalists 

 who have inquired into the circumstances may lead to its being after- 

 wards resuscitated from oblivion by those who have not, and hence the 

 blunder is given a fresh start in life, which a short paragraph in a 



