3 DICTIONARY OF BIRDS 



its author's supervision in 1740, 1748, 1758 and 1766. Impressed by 

 tlie belief that verbosity was the bane of science, he carried terseness to 

 an extreme which frequently created obscurity, and this in no branch of 

 zoology more than in that which relates to Birds. Still the practice 

 introduced by him of assigning to each species a diagnosis by which it 

 ought in theory to be distinguishable from any other known species, and 

 of naming it by two words — the first being the generic and the second 

 the specific term, was so manifest an improvement upon anything which 

 had previously obtained, that the Linnseau method of differentiation and 

 nomenclature established itself before long in spite of all opposition, and 

 in principle became almost universally adopted. The opposition came of 

 course from those who were habituated to the older state of things, and 

 saw no evil in the cumbrous, half-descriptive half-designative titles which 

 had to be employed whenever a species was to be spoken of or written 

 about. The supj)orters of the new method were the rising generation of 

 naturalists, many of whose names have since become famous, but among 

 them were some whose admiration of their chief carried them to a pitch 

 of enthusiasm which now seems absurd.^ Careful as Linnasus was in 

 drawing up his definitions of groups, it was immediately seen that they 

 occasionally comprehended creatures whose characteristics contradicted 

 the prescribed diagnosis. His chief glory lies in his having reduced, at 

 least for a time, a chaos into order, and in his shewing both by precept and 

 practice that a name was not a definition. In his classification of Birds 

 he for the most part followed Hay, and where he departed from his model 

 he seldom improved upon it. 



In 1745 Barrere brought out at Perpignan a little book called 

 Ornithologise Specimen nouum, and in 1752 Mohring published at Aurich 

 one still smaller, his Avium Genera. Both these works (now rare) are 

 manifestly framed on the Linnsean method, so far as it had then reached ; 

 but in their arrangement of the various forms of Birds they diff'ered 

 greatly from that which they designed to supplant, and they obtained 

 little success. Yet as systematists their authors were no worse than 

 Klein, whose liistorix Avium Prodromus, appearing at Liibeck in 1750, 

 and Stemmata Avium at Leipzig in 1759, met with considerable favour 

 in some quarters. The chief merit of the latter work lies in its forty 

 plates, whereon the heads and feet of many Birds are indifferently 

 figured.- 



But, while the successive editions of Linnseus's great work were 

 revolutionizing Natural History, and his example of precision in language 

 was producing excellent effect on scientific writers, several other authors 

 were advancing the study of Ornithology in a very different way — a*, way 

 that pleased the eye even more than his labours were pleasing the mind. 

 Between 1731 and 1743 Mark Catesby brought out in London his 



■* Such an one was Rafinesque, in many respects a fantastic author. Simple as _ 

 the principle of binomial nomenclature looks, its practice is not so easy, and there 

 have not been wanting of late years quasi-scientific ■writers to mistake it wholly. 



* After Klein's death his Prodromus, written in Latin, had the unwonted fortune 

 of two distinct translations into German, published in the same year, 1760, the one 

 at Leipzig and Liibeck by Behn, the other at Danzig by Reyger — each of whom 

 added more or less to the original. 



