278 Lord Walden on Mr. Allan Hume's 



a reflectiou on Jerdon. And yet Mr. Hume's tender and dis- 

 interested solicitude for Jerdou's reputation does not prevent 

 him thus writing of Jerdon " that owing to his ill health in 

 later years and his disregard for thehterary side of his work'' 

 his " merits " " have been greatly underrated ; " and further 

 on '' I admit that his book embodies many grave errors " {t. c. 

 p. 5). His '' merits underrated " \ By whom, where ? Not 

 in Europe, surely not throughout India ! " Disregard for 

 the literary side of his work " ! to be said of a man whose 

 extraordinary acquaintance with the literature of his subject is 

 displayed in all he wrote. Extraordinary in Jerdon, for in 

 his day communication with Europe was infrequent and tbe 

 land was not flooded, as now, with manuals and hand-books 

 whereby the most shaUovv can attain with small exertion a 

 smattering of facts sufficient to babble about under the name 

 of science. " Grave errors " ! It may be so. I have not 

 detected them. But Mr. Hume says so. Dr. Einsch does 

 not*. Mr. Blyth, with whose conclusions Dr. Einsch is not 

 always in accord, was, while in India, essentially a cabinet 

 naturalist. During the many years of his Indian sojourn he 

 hardly quitted f the four walls of the museum his genius, 

 knowledge, industry, and indomitable energy raised to the 

 highest rank. Of the fourteen species of the genus Falceornis 

 enumerated by Dr. Einsch he knew, previous to 1868, in 

 the wild state, at the most only four — P. torquatus, P. cyano- 

 cephalus of Bengal, P. eupatnus, and P. melanorhynchus. As 

 caged birds he may occasionally have seen two more — P. 

 schisticeps, and perhaps P. longicaudatus. 



Let us now take each of the species of the genus Palceornis 

 in the sequence followed by Mr. Hume, and examine into the 

 merits and justness of his criticisms. Eirst comes Palaornis 

 cupatrius (Linn.) =P. alexandri (Linn.) of Jerdon, Blyth, and 

 the older Indian writers, subdivided by Mr. Hume in his Re- 

 view, and for the first time, into three distinct species. Mr. 



* No man, with so long a career, made fewer bad " species " tlian Dr. 

 Jerdon, proof by itself of his knowledge of his subject. 



t I believe he only made two excursions of any importance — one to the 

 Miduapur jungles and, much later, on account of illness, one to Burma. 



