xviii PREFACE 



of unique value. He is a singularly competent observer. 

 Recently he was speaking of his first trip to Alaska and how 

 he had been interested in reading about the *' Alaskan jay" 

 — only to find it, as he expressed it, '' the same old whiskey- 

 jack," identical in every essential with the familiar whiskey- 

 jacks of the woods of Maine, Canada, Michigan, and the 

 Rocky Mountains. He said that he knew the blue jay, the 

 Florida jay, the big-crested jay of the Rockies, all obviously 

 distinct species; and he knew the whiskey-jack, or Canada 

 jay, also as a separate species; but that to write about a 

 local variety of the latter as the "Alaskan jay" as if it were 

 a separate species in the sense that is true of the Florida jay, 

 or blue jay, or Steller's long-crested jay, merely served 

 to confuse him — that is, to confuse an intelligent, outdoors 

 layman-naturalist, a keen observer. Mr. Shiras is emphat- 

 ically right in his complaint. Give the Alaskan form of 

 the whiskey-jack a third Latin name, by all means, to dis- 

 tinguish him in writing treatises exclusively for specialists 

 — if it gratifies them; but in books for general reading by 

 intelligent men call it the whiskey-jack, mentioning only if 

 necessary that the allusion is to the Alaskan form. 



Let us illustrate what we mean by using as examples the 

 big cats: the lion, tiger, cougar, jaguar, and leopard. These 

 represent five very distinct animals. The last two come 

 closer together than is the case with any of the others, but 

 even as regards these the distinction is obvious. The use 

 of the word species as regards each of these big cats conveys 

 a definite, graphic, and easily grasped idea, which corre- 

 sponds to the facts in the case. But each is split into vari- 

 ous forms. The cougars of Brazil, Patagonia, the Andes, 

 Colorado, Oregon, and Florida all diff^er from one another. 



