S DICTIONARY OF BIRDS 
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 anything which 
had previously obtained, that the Linnean method of differentiation 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 Linneus was in 
drawing up his definitions of groups, it was immediately seen that they 
occasionally comprehended 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 classification of Birds 
he for the most part followed Ray, and where he departed from his model 
he seldom improved upon it. 
In 1745 Barrere brought out at Perpignan a little book called 
Ornithologie Specimen nouwm, and in 1752 Méhring published at Aurich 
one still smaller, his Aviwm Genera. Both these works (now rare) are 
manifestly framed on the Linnean 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 obtained 
little success. Yet as systematists their authors were no worse than 
Klein, whose Historiw Aviwm Prodromus, appearing at Liibeck in 1750, 
and Stemmata Aviwm 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 are indifferently 
figured.? 
But, while the successive editions of Linnewus’s great work were 
revolutionizing Natural History, and his example of precision in language 
was 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. 
Between 1731 and 1743 Mark Catesby brought out in London his 
1 Such an one was Rafinesque, in many respects a fantastic author, Simple as 
the principle of binomial nomenclature looks, its practice is not so easy, and there 
have not been wanting of late years quasi-scientific writers to mistake it wholly. 
? After Klein’s death his Prodromus, written in Latin, had the unwonted fortune 
‘of two distinct translations into German, published in the same year, 1760, the one 
at Leipzig and Liibeck by Behn, the other at Danzig by Reyger—each of whom 
added more or less to the original. 
