Coues's History of the Evening Grosbeak. 69 



size, drawn and colored in William Swainson's well-known style, 

 accompanies the notice to which I refer ; the remainder of the 

 account in the work just named consisting of the junior author's 

 fanciful speculations on the quinary affinities of this remarkable 

 Grosbeak. His ingenuity brings him to the sage conclusion that 

 the bird is related to certain temdrostral types, notwithstanding 

 that it has one of the largest, stoutest, stockiest bills to be found 

 in the whole Fringilline assemblage. 



It is sometimes interesting, and it may not seldom become edify- 

 ing, to look back through the perspective of time and see how the 

 heaviest artillery of the systematists may turn to Quaker guns, 

 when thus viewed through the telescope reversed. It is no less 

 profitable to ponder how the disputes of the schools arise in partic- 

 ular ways of looking at things that never change, and are fostered 

 by the varying idiosyncrasies of individuals who aspire to solve 

 the silent, persistent, unending mysteries that Nature will never 

 fully reveal to man's unaided understanding. We play a game 

 of chess with brilliant pieces of natural workmanship, each on a 

 checkered field of his individual experiences, all too small for the 

 full development of the game, yet quite too large for us to cover 

 successfully ; and the most we may indulge a hope of, is the ban-en 

 victory of a perpetual stale-mate. We shift and shift positions, but 

 can never extricate ourselves. Thus Bonaparte wrote in 1828 : 

 " The Evening Grosbeak is .... so precisely similar in form to the 

 Hawfinch-type of the group, as to defy the attempts of the most de- 

 termined innovators to separate them"; and in 1850 he established 

 a genus Hesperiphona upon a basis which he had thus declared not 

 to exist. We seem to be no wiser after than before such events as 

 these, in anything that pertains to our actual knowledge of the 

 Evening Grosbeak. 



Let us turn another page of written history respecting the sub- 

 ject of the present notice. The statements of fact I have made are 

 all staple accounts, copied by each successive compiler with no less 

 scrupulous exactitude than I have myself exhibited. Quite a fresh 



ditfers from the male, spoke from insufficient evidence, and Richardson, making 

 note of this inadvertence, committed another error. The subject was not recti- 

 fied until Audubon described and figured the female from specimens and infor- 

 mation furnished him by Townsend. The female obtained by Audubon from 

 Townsend was marked " Black Hills, June 3, 1824," and therefore missed 

 being the earliest specimen of which we have any account by only one year. 



