APPENDIX. 



Accidental Visitors. 



The birds already enumerated belong to the class which 

 we may call true Britons. These are included in the first 

 part of Harting's Handbook of British Birds (see above, 

 Introd.). His second part consists of what he calls " Rare 

 and Accidental Visitors '' ; these have been met with in 

 Britain only a few or a very few times, some of them only 

 once. In the last published list of British Birds (Lond. 

 1883), compiled by a Committee of the British Orni- 

 thologists' Union, and referred to above as the Ibis List* it 

 has "been doemed advisable to regard as British every species 

 of which even a single specimen has been obtained in an 

 undoubtedly wild state within the confines of the British 

 Islands " (Pref. v.), and accordingly they are all included 

 in one and the same list arranged all together according 

 to their natural orders, f The histories of British Birds 

 previously published had tacitly proceeded upon the same 

 principle. The late Mr. Newman, however, in the Preface 

 to his edition of Montagues Ornithological Dictionary (Lond. 

 1866), strongly disapproves of the method employed by his 

 predecessors. He considers that a great number of these 

 species now added (since the time of Montagu), have " not 

 the slightest claim to the title of British Birds,'' and that the 

 records of these birds from a purely scientific point of view, 

 "are utterly worthless." " The time seems to have arrived,'' 



* I am reminded that my designation f A table is prefixed, dividing the birds 



of " Ibis List " is not accurate, it should (numerically ouly) into four categories, 



have been referred to as " List of Brit, (1.) Residents. (2.) Summer Visitors. 



Birds compiled by a Committee of the (3). Winter Visitors. (4). Occasional 



British Ornithological Union" Visitors. 



