1 6 DICTIONARY OF BIRDS 



the exploration of the recently extended Russian empire supplied not only 

 much material to the Commentarii and Acta of the Academy of St. 

 Petersburg, but more that is to be found in their narratives — all of it being 

 of the highest interest to students of Holarctic Ornithology. Nearly the 

 whole of their results, it may here be said, were summed up in the important 

 ZoograpJiia Rosso- Asiatica of the first-named naturalist, two volumes of 

 which saw the light in 1811, — the year of its author's death, — but, owing 

 to circumstances over which he had no control, were not generally accessible 

 till twenty years later. Of still wider interest are the accounts of Cook's 

 three famous voyages, though unhappily much of the information gained 

 by the naturalists who accompanied him on one or more of them seems to 

 be irretrievably lost : the original observations of the elder Forster were 

 not printed till 1844, and the valuable series of zoological drawings made 

 by the younger Forster and William Ellis still remain unpublished in the 

 British Museum. The several accounts by John White, Collins, Phillip, 

 Hunter and others, of the colonization of New South Wales at the end of 

 the last century, ought not to be overlooked by any Australian orni- 

 thologist. The only information belonging to this period on the Orni- 

 thology of South America is contained in the two works on Chili by 

 Molina, published at Bologna in 1776 and 1782. The travels of Le 

 Vaillant in South Africa having ended in 1785, his great Oiseaux 

 d'Afrique began to appear in Paris in 1797 ;^ but it is hard to speak 

 patiently of this work, for several of the species described in it are 

 certainly not, and never were inhabitants of that country — admittedly 

 so in some cases, though in others he gives a long account of the circum- 

 stances in which he observed them.- 



From travellers who employ themselves in collecting the animals of 

 any distant country the zoologists who stay at home and study those of 

 their own district, be it great or small, are really not so much divided as 

 at first might appear. Both may well be named " Faunists," and of the 

 latter there were not a few who having turned their attention more or 

 less to Ornithology should here be mentioned, and first among them 

 Rzaczynski, who in 1721 brought out at Sandomirsk the Historia naturalis 

 curiosa regni Polonise, to which an Auduariwrn was posthumously published 

 at Danzig in 1742. This also may be perhaps the most proper place to 

 notice the Historia Avium Hungariee of Grossinger, published at Posen in 

 1793. In 1734 J. L. Frisch began the long series of works on the Birds 

 of Germany with which the literature of Ornithology is enriched, by his 

 Vorstellimg der Vogel Teutschlands, which was only completed in 1763, and, 

 its coloured plates proving very attractive, was again issued at Berlin in 

 1817. The little fly-sheet of Zorn^ — for it is scarcely more — on the 



1 lu 1798 he issued a duodecimo edition of this work, which seems to be little 

 known. Two volumes, extending to No. 117 of the folio edition, are in my posses- 

 sion, but I cannot say whether more appeared. His large work failed to obtain 

 support, and finished with its sixth volume in 1808. 



2 It has been charitably suggested that, his collection and notes having suflfered 

 shipwreck, he was induced to supply the latter li-om his memory and the former by 

 the nearest approach to his lost specimens that he could obtain. This explanation, 

 poor as it is, fails, however, in regard to some species. 



3 His earlier work under the title of Petinotheologie can hardly be deemed scientific. 



