EGGS 183 
is in truth no such thing. What engineer can be said to understand 
his business if he knows not the purpose to which the machines he 
makes are to be applied and is unacquainted with their mode of 
working? We may investigate thoroughly the organs of any 
animal, we may trace them from the earliest moment in which they 
become defined, and watch them as they develop to maturity, we 
may comprehend the way in which every part of a complicated 
structure is successively built up; but, if we take not the trouble 
to know their effect on the economy of the creature, we as natural- 
ists have done but half our task, and abandon our labour when the 
fulness of reward is coming upon us. The field-naturalist, properly 
instructed, crowns the work of the comparative anatomist and the 
physiologist, though without the necessary education he is little 
more than an empiric, even should he possess the trained cunning 
of the savage on whose knowledge of the habits of wild animals 
depends his chance of procuring a meal. 
Perhaps the greatest scientific triumph of oologists lies in their 
having fully appreciated the intimate alliance of the LimIcoL# (the 
great group of Snipes and Plovers) with the GAvi (the Gulls, 
Terns, and other birds more distantly connected with them) before 
it was recognized by any professed taxonomer—L’Herminier, whose 
researches have been much overlooked, excepted; though to such 
an one was given the privilege of placing that affinity beyond cavil 
(Huxley, Proc. Zool. Soc. 1867, pp. 426, 456-458 ; cf. Ibis, 1868, 
p- 92). In like manner it is believed that oologists first saw the 
need of separating from the true PASSERES several groups of birds 
that had for many years been unhesitatingly associated with that 
very uniform assemblage. Diffidence as to their own capacity for 
meddling with matters of systematic arrangement may possibly 
have been the cause which deterred the men who were content to 
brood over birds’ eggs from sooner asserting the validity of the 
views they held. Following the example furnished by the objects 
of their study, they seem to have chiefly sought to hide their off- 
spring from the curious eye—and if such was their design it must 
be allowed to have been admirably successful. In enthusiastic zeal 
for the prosecution of their favourite researches, however, they have 
never yielded to, if they have not surpassed, any other class of 
naturalists. If a storm-swept island, only to be reached at the risk 
of life, held out the hope of some oological novelty there was the 
egg-collector (Faber, Isis, xx. pp. 633-688; Proctor, Naturalist, 
1838, pp. 411, 412). Did another treasure demand his traversing 
a burning desert (Tristram, [dis, 1859, p. 79) or sojourning for 
several winters within the wildest wastes of the Arctic Circle 
(Wolley, Jbis, 1859, pp. 69-76; 1861, pp. 92-106; Kennicott, 
Rep. Smithson. Inst. 1862, pp. 39, 40), he endured the necessary 
hardships to accomplish his end, and the possession to him of an 
