Mr. Vigors'6 Sketches in Ornithology. 309 



are by these means brought together ; and the scattered informa- 

 tion of every country is concentrated into one common repository. 

 While publications of more ostensible pretensions slowly deal out 

 the more finished and elaborate productions of science, a journal, 

 continually at work, becomes a storehouse that furnishes them 

 with materials for their labours, and at the same time keeps alive 

 the spirit of inquiry ia general, by a constant and regular supply 

 of interesting intelligence. 



Conceiving such beneficial results to be likely to arise from a 

 publication like the present, I shall beg leave to offer through its 

 pages a few imperfect observations on some groups in Ornitho- 

 logy. I call them imperfect with unaffected sincerity. Any 

 attempt to enter into the details of such groups under the. un- 

 favourable circumstances that attend the pursuit of natural history 

 at present in this country must necessarily be imperfect. We are 

 not onlyunsupplied with that indispensable information respecting 

 their internal anatomy, and their characteristick manners, which 

 forms the groundwork of zoological science, and which is equally 

 a desideratum with all, but we are even deficient in those subjects 

 for observation, which our contemporaries on the Continent 

 possess in superabundance. It is an extraordinary fact, that al- 

 though this country held the almost exclusive command over the 

 greater portion of the globe, for a considerable period of the last 

 and present century, and with it the equally exclusive power of 

 appropriating to ourselves the productions of nature that thus lay 

 within our reach, so much were those opportunities neglected, or 

 rather so much was the importance of such researches under- 

 valued, that we are far behind our continental neighbours, in 

 despite of all the disadvantages of exclusion under which they 

 laboured so long, in the accumulation of those stores, which are 

 necessary to the advancement of zoology. How far this is the 

 •case may be judged from the single fact, that, of a family on 

 which I am about to offer some observations in the present 

 number, and which extends to above three hundred described 

 species,* not a sixth part is to be consulted in the national re- 



* It has been suggested to me by a friend, that the observations I made in 

 the last Number of this Journal respecting the number of species described 



