INTRODUCTION 



Natural History of Carolina — two large folios containing highly-coloured 

 plates of the Birds of that colony, Florida and the Bahamas — the fore- 

 runners of those numerous costly tomes which will have to be mentioned 

 presently at greater length.^ Eleazar Albin between 1738 and 1740 

 produced a Natural History of Birds in three volumes of more modest 

 dimensions, seeing that it is in quarto ; but he seems to have been ignorant 

 of Ornithology, and his coloured plates are greatly inferior to Catesby's. 

 Far better both as draughtsman and as authority was George Edwards, 

 who in 1743 began, under almost the same title as Albin, a series of 

 plates with letterpress, which was continued by the name of Gleanings of 

 Natural History, and finished in 1760, when it had reached seven parts, 

 forming four quarto volumes, the figures of which are nearly always 

 quoted with approval.^ 



The year which saw the works of Edwards completed was still further 

 distinguished by the appearance in France, where little had been done 

 since Belon's days,^ in six quarto volumes, of the Ornithologie of Mathurin 

 Jacques Brisson — a work of very great merit so far as it goes, for as a 

 descriptive ornithologist the author stands even now unsurpassed ; but it 

 must be said that his knowledge, according to internal evidence, was con- 

 fined to books and to the external parts of Birds' skins. It was enough 

 for him to give a scrupulously exact description of such specimens aa 

 came under his eye, distinguishing these by prefixing two asterisks to 

 their name, using a single asterisk where he had only seen a part of the 

 Bird, and leaving unmarked those that he described from other authors. 

 He also added information as to the Museum (generally Reaumur^s, of 

 which he had been in charge) containing the specimen he described, act- 

 ing on a principle which would have been advantageously adopted by 

 many of his contemporaries and successors. His attempt at classification 

 was certainly better than that of Linnaeus ; and it is rather curious that 

 the researches of the latest ornithologists point to results in some degree 

 comparable with Brisson's systematic arrangement, for they refuse to keep 

 the Birds-of-Prey at the head of the Class Aves, and they require the 

 establishment of a much larger number of " Orders " than for a long while 

 •had been thought advisable. Of such "Orders" Brisson had twenty-six, 

 and he gave Pigeons and Poultry precedence of the Birds which are 

 carnivorous or scavengers. But greater value lies in his generic or sub- 

 generic divisions, which taken as a whole, are far more natural than those 

 of Linnaeus, and consequently capable of better diagnosis. More than this, 

 he seems to be the earliest ornithologist, perhaps the earliest zoologist, 

 to conceive the idea of each genus possessing what is now called a " type " 

 — though such a term does not occur in his work ; and, in like manner, 

 without declaring it in so many words, he indicated unmistakably the 

 existence of subgenera — all this being effected by the skilful use of names. 



1 Several Birds from Jamaica were figured in Sloane's Voyage, &c. (1705-1725), 

 and a good many exotic species in the Thesaurus, &c. of Seba (1734-1765), but 

 from their faulty execution these plates had little effect upon Ornithology. 



^ The works of Catesby and Edwards were afterwards reproduced at Nuremberg 

 and Amsterdam by Seligmann, with the letterpress in German, French and Dutch. 



2 Birds were treated of in a worthless fashion by one D, B. in a Didionnaire 

 raisonni et universel des animaux, published at Paris in 1759. 



