PREFACE. Vll 



to escape his notice, and has only just woke up to the fact that 

 things have been moving since he wrote his "Handbook to the 

 Birds of Great Britain " in 1872. The arrangement followed 

 in my book was duly set forth by me in my " Classification of 

 Birds " in 1891, and there is therefore nothing wonderful in an 

 author following his own ideas. The same may be said of Mr. 

 Harting's remarks on my nomenclature, and if he had studied 

 the Crows as diligently as he has done the Wading Birds, he 

 would probably have found little difficulty in recognising that 

 the black plumage of the former birds is really their only 

 warranty for inclusion in a single genus Corvus, and that the 

 characters for generic separation, when properly weighed, are 

 as important as the genera of CharadriidcE^ which Mr. Harting 

 accepts without hesitation. Some of the changes in nomen- 

 clature at which he "stands aghast" might have paralysed him 

 at any moment during the last twenty yearS;, and, as I have 

 already said, the genera of the Corvidce are none of them of 

 my own invention. 



Mr. Harting, moreover, entirely misunderstands the principle 

 of the duplicate generic and specific names by which such titles 

 as Graculiis graculus are arrived at. It is not adopted for the 

 sake of attaching the name of the typical species to that of 

 the genus. That this must often, and in fact generally, occur, 

 is really a matter of chance, and I am sorry that the mere 

 act of restoring Linnean specific names to their original posi- 

 tion has resulted in the duplication of the name, but then the 

 Linnean names ought never to have been used in a generic 

 sense. Thus, if Linn^us called the Partridge Tetrao perdix^ 

 the name perdix ought to be retained at all costs for the species. 

 When Perdix was taken in a generic sense and the species was 

 called Perdix cinerea, I contend that it ought never to have 

 been allowed, and if, in restoring the Linnean specific name of 

 perdix, it results that the oldest generic name is also Perdix, 



