CHAPTER XVII 



OUTDOOR AND INDOOR ORNITHOLOGY 



The amateur ornithologist should study birds in 

 every way that is open to him. A specialist whose 

 life is devoted to classification and who takes notice 

 only of the points that are important for this purpose, 

 is doing work that must be done, and which requires 

 a good man to do it. But after a time a bird may 

 no longer be to him a living creature with wonderful 

 powers and habits and character. He may come to 

 look upon it as existing only to be put in its exact 

 place in a system of classification. The outdoor 

 ornithologist who knows nothing about birds but 

 what he can learn by observation in the open, 

 though he is, perhaps, the most to be envied of all 

 specialists, yet has missed a great deal. He may 

 not know that the most active and ethereal of all 

 vertebrate animals is nearly related to a lizard. How 

 the reptilian bones have been adapted to purposes 

 of flight, how a cold-blooded torpid creature has 

 become warm-blooded and full of life, is altogether 

 out of the field of his observation. To another man 



