12 DICTIONARY OF BIRDS 



The British Museum had been formed, and he had access to everything 

 it contained in addition to the abundant materials afforded him by the 

 private Museum of Sir Ashton Lever. ^ Latham entered, so far as the 

 limits of his work would allow, into the history of the Birds he described, 

 and this with evident zest, whereby he differed from his French pre- 

 decessor ; but the number of cases in which he erred as to the determina- 

 tion of his species must be very great, and not unfrequently the same 

 species is described more than once. His Synopsis was finished in 1785 ; 

 two supplements were added in 1787 and 1802,^ and in 1790 he pro- 

 duced a Latin abstract of the work under the title of Index Ornithologicus, 

 wherein he assigned names on the Linnsean method to all the species 

 described. Not to recur again to his labours, it may be said here that 

 between 1821 and 1828 he published, at Winchester, in eleven volumes, 

 an enlarged edition of his original work, entitling it A General History of 

 Birds ; but his defects as a compiler, which had been manifest before, 

 rather increased with age, and the consequences were not happy. ^ 



About the time that Buffon was bringing to an end his studies of 

 Birds, Mauduyt undertook to write the Ornithologie of the Encyclopedic 

 Me'thodique — a comparatively easy task, considering the recent works of 

 his fellow-countrymen on that subject, and finished in 1784. Here it 

 requires no further comment, especially as a new edition was called for in 

 1790, the ornithological portion of which was begun by Bonnaterre, who, 

 however, had only finished 320 pages of it when he lost his life in the 

 French Revolution ; and the work thus arrested was continued by Vieillot 

 under the slightly changed title of Tableau encyclopMique et methodique des 

 trois rignes de la Nature — the Ornithologie forming volumes four to seven, 

 and not completed till 1823. In the former edition Mauduyt had taken 

 the subjects alphabetically ; but here they are disposed according to an 

 arrangement, with some few modifications, furnished by D'Aubenton, 

 which is extremely shallow and unworthy of consideration. 



Several other works bearing upon Ornithology in general, but of less 

 importance than most of those just named, belong to this period. Among 

 others may be mentioned the Genera of Birds by Thomas Pennant, first 

 printed at Edinburgh in 1773 in octavo, and very rare, but well known 

 by the quarto edition which appeared in London in 1781 ; the Elementa 

 Ornithologica * and Museum Ornithologicum of Schaffer, published at Eatis- 

 bon in 1774 and 1784 respectively; Peter Brown's New Illustrations of 

 Zoology in London in 1776; Hermann's Tabulae Affinitatum Animalium 

 at Strasburg in 1783, followed posthumously in 1804 by his Observationes 



^ In 1792 Shaw began the Museum Leverianum in illustration of this collection, 

 which was finally dispersed by sale in 1806, and what is known to remain of it found 

 its way either to the collection of the then Lord Stanley (afterwards 13th Earl of 

 Derby), and was, at his death in 1851, bequeathed to the Liverpool Museum, or to 

 Vienna [Ibis, 1873, pp. 14-54, 105-124; 1874, p. 461). Of the specimens in the 

 British Museum described by Latham not one exists. They were probably very im- 

 perfectly prepared. 



^ A German translation by Bechstein subsequently appeared. 



2 He also prepared for publication a second edition of his Index Ornithologicus^ 

 which was never printed, and the manuscript is now in my possession. 



* The so-called second edition (1779) of this has only a new title-page. 



