INTRODUCTION. 



THE HISTORIANS OF BRITISH BIRDS. 



Ornithologists may roughly be divided into four classes, according to 

 the four points of view from which they study birds. The ideal ornitho- 

 logist studies his favourite science from every point of view ; but unfor- 

 tunately the men to whose ornithological work this chapter is devoted 

 have been by no means ideal students, and, with scarcely an exception, 

 they will be found to fall naturally into one or other of the four following 

 groups : — First, those who study the bodies of birds in the dissecting- 

 room ; second, those who study the skins of birds in the museum ; third, 

 those who study ornithological literature in the library ; and, fourth, those 

 who watch living birds in their native haunts. Of these the morphologists 

 (the men who form the first group) are more especially a class apart : to 

 them we must ultimately look for a true classification of birds ; but this is a 

 work of the future, though much progress has been made in this department 

 since the theory of the gradual evolution of species, in consequence of the 

 accumulated results during many generations of descent with slight modifi- 

 cation, has been generally accepted. To be a good ornithological morpho- 

 logist it is necessary to have a knowledge of the morphology of all vertebrate 

 animals and to know something of that of the invertebrates. The widely 

 different branches of morphology are so complex, that in the present state 

 of the science it requires a lifetime devoted to each before reliable results 

 can be anticipated; and we must look forward to a second generation 

 of morphologists, working on evolutionary lines, before the discrepancies 

 in the views of the various specialists can be collated and sufficiently 

 harmonized to make a classification of birds possible. Anatomists will find 

 abundant fields of labour to illustrate or correct the conclusions which 

 Huxley has drawn from a study of the bones of the palate. We want half 

 a dozen other Huxleys to study and compare other parts of the skeleton 

 with the same care and judgment. It cannot be supposed that Nitzsch 

 has exhausted the lessons to be learnt from a contemplation of the various 

 plans in which the feathers are distributed on the surface of birds. Garrod 



VOL. III. b 



