FIELJ> STUDY IN ORNITHOLOGY.* 



By H. B. Tristram, F. R. S. 



It is difficult for the mind to grasp the advance in biological science 

 (I use the term biology in its wide etymological, not its recently 

 restricted sense) which has taken i^lace since I first attended the 

 meetings of the British Association, some forty years ago. In those 

 days the now familiar expressions of ''natural selection," 'Msolation," 

 " the struggle for existence," "the survival of the fittest," were unheard 

 of and unknown, though many an observer was busied in culling the 

 facts which were being poured into the lap of the philosopher who 

 should mold the first g^reat epoch in natural science since the days 

 of Linuicus. 



It is to the importance and value of field observation that 1 would 

 venture in the first place to direct your attention. 



My predecessors in this chair have been, of recent years, distin- 

 guished men who have searched deeply into the abstrusest mysteries 

 of physiology. Thither I do not presume to follow them. I ratlier 

 come before you as a survivor of the old-world naturalist, as one 

 whose researches have been, not in the laboratory or with the micro- 

 scope, but on the wide desert, the mountain side, and the isles of the 

 sea. 



This year is the centenary of the death of Gilbert White, whom we 

 may look upon as the father of field naturalists. It is true that Sir T. 

 Browne, Willughby, and Eay had each, in the middle of the seventeenth 

 century, committed various observations to print; but though Wil- 

 lughby, at least, recognized the importance of the soft parts in afford- 

 ing a key to classification, as well as the osteology, as maybe seen from 

 his observation of the ]>ccnliar formations, in the Divers [Colymhida) of 

 the tibia, with its prolonged procnemial process, of which he has given 

 a figure, or his description of the elongation of the posterior branches 

 of the woodpecker's tongue, as well as by his careful description of the 

 intestines of all specimens which came under his notice in the flesh, 



* Opening address before tlie British Association for the Advancement of Science; 

 at Notingliam, September, 1893, by the jiresideiit of the Section of Biology. (From 

 The Zoologist, London, October, 1893, vol. xvii, pp. 361-386; and Nature, September 

 21,1893, vol. XLViii, pp. 490.) 



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