INTRODUCTION 9 
Natural History of Carolina—two large folios containing highly-coloured 
plates of the Birds of that colony, Florida and the Bahamas—the fore- 
runners of those numerous costly tomes which will have to be mentioned 
presently at greater length. Eleazar Albin between 1738 and 1740 
produced a Natural History of 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 greatly inferior to Catesby’s. 
Far better both as draughtsman and as authority was George Edwards, 
who in 1748 began, under almost the same title as Albin, a series of 
plates with letterpress, which was continued by the name of Gleanings of 
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.? 
The year which saw the works of Edwards completed was still further 
distinguished by the appearance in France, where little had been done 
since Belon’s days,® in six quarto volumes, of the Ornithologie of Mathurin 
Jacques Brisson—a work of very great merit so far as it goes, for as a 
descriptive ornithologist the author stands even now unsurpassed ;_ but it 
must be said that his knowledge, according to internal evidence, was con- 
fined 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 Réaumut’s, of 
which he had been in charge) containing the specimen he described, act- 
ing on a principle which would have been advantageously adopted by 
many of his contemporaries and successors. His attempt at classification 
was cerfainly better than that of Linneus; and it is rather curious that 
the researches of the latest ornithologists 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 
had been thought advisable. Of such “Orders” Brisson had twenty-six, 
and he gave Pigeons and Poultry precedence of the Birds which are 
carnivorous or scavengers. But greater value lies in his generic or sub- 
generic divisions, which taken as a whole, are far more natural than those 
of Linnzus, 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. 
1 Several Birds from Jamaica were figured in Sloane’s Voyage, &c. (1705-1725), 
and a good many exotic species in the Thesaurus, &c. of Seba (1734-1765), but 
* from their faulty execution these plates had little effect upon Ornithology. 
2 The works of Catesby and Edwards were afterwards reproduced at Nuremberg 
and Amsterdam by Seligmann, with the letterpress in German, French and Dutch. 
3 Birds were treated of in a worthless fashion by one D. B. in a Dictionnaire 
raisonné et wniversel des animaux, published at Paris in 1759. 
