ORNITHOLOGY 



proper place nearly every bird he was likely to meet with. 

 Ray's interest in ornithology continued, and in 1694 he 

 completed a Synopsis Methodica Avium, which, through 

 the fault of the booksellers to whom it was entrusted, 

 was not published till 1713, when Derham gave it to the 

 world. 1 



Linnajus. Two years after Ray's death, Lixx.kus, the great 

 reformer of Natural History, was born, and in 1735 ap- 

 peared the first edition of the celebrated Systema Naturae. 

 Successive editions of this work were produced under its 

 author's supervision in 1740, 1748, 1758, and 1766. 

 Impressed by the belief that verbosity was the bane of 

 science, he carried terseness to an extreme which frequently 

 created obscurity, and this in no branch of zoology more 

 than in that which relates to Birds. Still the practice 

 introduced by him of assigning to each species a diagnosis 

 by which it ought in theory to be distinguishable from any 

 other known species, and of naming it by two words — the 

 first being the generic and the second the specific term, 

 was so manifest an improvement upon any thing which had 

 previously obtained that the Linmean method of differ- 

 entiation and nomenclature established itself before long 

 in spite of all opposition, and in principle became almost 

 universally adopted. The opposition came of course from 

 those who were habituated to the older state of things, 

 and saw no evil in the cumbrous, half-descriptive half- 

 designative titles which had to be employed whenever a 

 species was to be spoken of or written about. The 

 supporters of the new method were the rising generation 

 of naturalists, many of whose names have since become 

 famous, but among them were some whose admiration of 

 their chief carried them to a pitch of enthusiasm which 

 now seems absurd. Careful as Linnaeus was in drawing up 

 his definitions of groups, it was immediately seen that they 

 occasionally were made to comprehend creatures whose 

 characteristics contradicted the prescribed diagnosis. His 

 chief glory lies in his having reduced, at least for a time, 

 a chaos into order, and in his shewing both by precept and 

 practice that a name was not a definition. In his classifica- 

 tion of Birds he for the most part followed Ray, and where 

 he departed from his model he seldom improved upon it. 



Barrerc. In 1745 Barrere brought out at Perpignan a little 

 book called Ornithologies Specimen nouum, and in 1752 



Motoring. Moheing published at Aurich one still smaller, his Avium 

 Genera. Both these works (now rare) are manifestly 

 framed on the Linnasan method, so far as it had then 

 reached; but in their arrangement of the various forms of 

 Birds they differed greatly from that which they designed 

 to supplant, and they deservedly obtained little success. 

 Yet as systematists their authors were no worse than 



Klein. Klein, whose Historix Avium Prodroinus, appearing at 

 Liibeck in 1750, and Stemmata Avium at Leipzig in 1759, 

 met with considerable favour in some quarters. The chief 

 merit of the latter work lies in its forty plates, whereon 

 the heads and feet of many Birds arc indifferently figured. 2 

 But, while the successive editionsof Linmeus's great work 

 were revolutionizing Natural History, and his example of 

 precision in language producing excellent effect on scientific 

 writers, several other authors were advancing the study of 

 Ornithology in a very different way — a way that pleased 

 the eye even more than his labours were pleasing the mind. 



Catesby. Between 1731 and 1743 Mark Catesby brought out in 



1 To tins was added a supplement by PETrVER on the Bird of Madras, 

 taken from pictures and information sent him by one Edward Buckley 

 of Fort St George, being the first attempt to catalogue the Birds of 

 any part of the British possessions in India. 



2 After Klein's death his Prodromus, written in Latin, hail the 

 unwonted fortune of two distinct translations into German, published 

 in the same year 1760, the one at Leipzig and Liibeck by lliai.v, 

 the other at Dauzig by Betgeb — each of whom added more or less to 

 the original. 



London his Natural History of Carolina — two large f li i 

 containing highly-coloured plates of the Birds of tli, t 

 colony, Florida, ami the Bahamas — the forerunners of 

 those numerous costly tomes which will have to be men- 

 tioned presently at greater length. 3 Eleazae .\ii:i\ 

 between 173S and 1740 produced a Natural History <;/' 

 Birds in three volumes of more modest dimensions, seeing 

 that it is in quarto; but he seems to have been ignorant 

 of Ornithology, and his coloured plates are greathj inferior 

 to Catesby 's. Far better both as draughtsman and as 

 authority was Gboege Edwards, who in 1743 began, Edwards 

 under the same title as Albin, a series of plates with letter- 

 press, which was continued by the name of Gleanings in 

 Natural History, and finished in 1760, when it had reached 

 seven parts, forming four quarto volumes, the figures of 

 which are nearly always quoted with approval. 4 



The year which saw the works of Edwards completed 

 was still further distinguished by the appearance in France, 

 where little had been done since Belun's days," 1 in six 

 quarto volumes, of the Omithologieoi Mathcrix Jacques 

 Frisson — a work of very great merit so far as it goes, for Brissou. 

 as a descriptive ornithologist the author stands even now 

 unsurpassed; but it must be said that his knowled . 

 according to internal evidence, was confined to books and 

 to the external parts of Birds' skins. It was enough for 

 him to give a scrupulously exact description of such 

 specimens as came under his eye, distinguishing these by 

 prefixing two asterisks to their name, using a single asterisk 

 where he had only seen a part of the Bird, and leaving 

 unmarked those that he described from other authors. 

 He also added information as to the Museum (generally 

 Beaumur's, of which he had been in charge) containing 

 the specimen he described, acting on a principle which 

 would have been advantageously adopted by many of his 

 contemporaries and successors. His attempt at classifica- 

 tion was certainly better than that of Linnaeus ; and it is 

 rather curious that the researches of the latest ornitho- 

 logists point to results in some degree comparable with 

 Brisson's systematic arrangement, for they refuse to keep 

 the Birds-of-Prey at the head of the Class Aves, and they 

 require the establishment of a much larger number of 

 " Orders " than for a long while has been thought advisable. 

 Of such " Orders " Brisson had twenty-six, and he gave 

 Pigeons and Poultry precedence of the Birds which are 

 plunderers and scavengers. But greater value lies in his 

 generic or sub-generic divisions, which, taken as a whole, are 

 far more natural than those of Linnaeus, and consequently 

 capable of better diagnosis. More than this, he seems to be 

 the earliest ornithologist, perhaps the earliest zoologist, to 

 conceive the idea of each genus possessing what is now called 

 a " type " — though such a term does not occur in his work ; 

 and, in like manner, without declaring it in so many words, 

 he indicated unmistakably the existence of subgenera — 

 all this being effected by the skilful use of names. Unfor- 

 tunately he was too soon in the field to avail himself, even 

 had he been so minded, of the convenient mode of nomencla- 

 ture brought into use by Linnaeus. Immediately on the 

 completion of his Eigne Animate in 1756, Brisson set about 

 his Ornithologie, and it is only in the last two volumes of 

 the latter that any reference is made to the tenth edition 

 of the Systema Naturae, in which the binomial method 



3 Several Birds from Jamaica were figured in Sloane's Voyage, &c. 

 (1705-1725), and a good many exotic species in the Thesaurus, &c, 

 of Seea (1734-1765), but from their faulty execution these plates had 

 little effect upon Ornithology. 



1 The works of Catesby and Edwards were afterwards reproduced 

 at Nuremberg and Amsterdam by Seligmann, with the letterpress in 

 German, French, and Dutch. 



5 Birds were treated of in a worthless fashion by one D. B. in a 

 Dictionnaire raisonni et imiversel des animaux, published at Paris in. 

 1759. 



