Their Eggs and Nests. 25 



steering clear of uninteresting, perhaps unnecessary 

 technicalities, to be equally careful alike to admit 

 nothing such as to discourage the attempt after more 

 accurate knowledge, and, on the other hand, by no 

 means to omit to notice anything that may possibly 

 serve to assist all such as desire, or may be aspire to, 

 fuller and completer knowledge. 



With such views, then, the reviser might, and most 

 likely would, make a great mistake if he burdened the 

 few pages available to him for fresh matter with dis- 

 quisitions as to the superiority of this or that system 

 of arrangement over some other or others ; or the pre- 

 ferableness of this or that classified list of genera and 

 species, orders, families, and sub-families over this or 

 that other. The misfortune is — and it really is a 

 great misfortune to very many juvenile enquirers 

 about " our feathered friends " — that there are so 

 many differences or divergences or contentions as 

 those above alluded to. It will be our endeavour to 

 keep as clear of them all as one possibly can in a book 

 of this sort. 



Still, it is absolutely necessary to the very being of 

 the book itself, that there should be some preference 

 shown, inasmuch as without it there could be no 

 attempt made at arrangement or classification of any 

 sort or degree whatever. In the Original Edition the 

 author took the then recent work by the late Mr. 

 Yarrell — a book welcomed with the liveliest and 

 heartiest recognition by all the ornithological world — 

 as liis standard book or book of reference. In the inter- 

 val between the completed publication of the original 

 edition of Yarrcli's work ^iud the present time, that 



