118



Our Increasing Purpose.



Pheasants—complete to the minutest detail—before which one

stammers with admiration, seeking vainly for words. Another is

one of the greatest living authorities on taxidermy, and has for years

enriched American zoology with a masterly series of bird studies.

To-day we await with interest the completion of his monograph on

mound-building birds. A third has written from the depths of his

great knowledge many books and papers on matters ornithological-

scientific, scholarly, practical—linking aviculture delightfully with

journalism, whether he writes of ornithological oddities, of fancy

Pheasants, or of the care of rare Water-fowl. A fourth is an

acknowledged authority on Parrakeets. Others, again, are known for

brilliant work on foreign Finches, for nature study in the African

bush, or for research among Mammalia. By the courtesy of our

contemporaries their own published pages are free to our columns,

from the embryology of the Ostrich to the habits of the Albatrosses

of the Pacific. The Magazine is indeed honoured by such con¬

tributors. The Council appreciates warmly these and many, many

others who have brought the Society through four years of war.


Nothing in this world stands still ; as the old proverb has it,

not to go forwards is to go back. The dawn of peace gives oppor¬

tunity for an avicultural stock-taking, for a review of the new

aviculture, modified and transformed in many ways by the long war,

moulded and remoulded by forces beyond the control of any of us,

embodying all that was best in the old system, yet with new

characters of its own.


The last issue was a number in the old style; next month’s

Magazine will be in the new—a selected issue, featuring papers

typical of each department of the Society’s activities, illustrating

the dictum of Stanley Houghton :


“ It’s the younger generation that always wins : that's how the world goes on. - ’


. G. R.



