CLASSIFICATION AND NOMENCLATURE. 29 



It has long been a puzzle how the muscular action necessary 

 to keep birds on the wing so long as they often do could be 

 possible ; and Professor Tobridge, an American scientist, ex- 

 plained the recent discovery by his son that birds of prey and 

 others have the power to lock together those parts of the wing 

 holding the extended feathers corresponding to the fingers of 

 the human hand. The action of the air on the wing in this 

 condition extends the elbow, which is prevented from opening 

 too far by a cartilage. The wings may keep this position for an 

 indefinite length of time with no muscular action on the part of 

 the bird. While resting in this way the bird cannot rise in a 

 still atmosphere, but if there be a horizontal current, it may 

 allow itself to be carried along by it, with a slight tendency 

 downward, and so gain a momentum by which — with a slight 

 change of direction — it may rise to some extent, still without 

 muscular action of the wings. The Professor believed it quite 

 possible for a bird to sleep on the wing. 



Classification and Nomenclature. 



As simplicity and fact are my chief objects in writing this 

 book, so observations on the habits of each species are my 

 principal study. We may quarrel over genera, families, or 

 orders, each anxious to place the various arrangements in their 

 assumed proper groups — arrogating to themselves perfection — 

 like Sectarianism in religion, and yet all fail, in consequence of 

 the complexity, or rather vast simplicity and complete perfection 

 of Nature in all her faultless chain of universal harmony. So, 

 paying little heed to what genus or family they may be con- 

 sidered by the arbitrary systems of man to belong to, I will 

 describe each bird. 



With the affinities so much interrupted in the comparatively 

 circumscribed area on which I am writing, it were little short of 

 presumption trying to classify the birds otherwise than by some 

 previously recognised system. But this is secondary to the 

 history and description of each species by itself, which is the 

 true object of penning this unpretending work on the feathered 

 friends of our youth, and to tell what I know of them individually 

 from my rambles and experiences in life, and set down any 

 striking incident of fact I can gather from others about them. 



To arrange the 350 species of the British Birds (far less those 

 of the St Andrews district only) in anything like the order so 



