AN INQUIRY INTO THE HISTORY OF THE CURRENT 
ENGLISH NAMES OF NORTH AMERICAN LAND BIRDS.2 
By SPENCER TROTTER. 
Technical nomenclature is the embodiment of that orderly 
and definite arrangement of knowledge which constitutes a science. 
It serves to symbolize a conception of the relationships that exist 
between living beings, one with another, and is at once the expres- 
sion of a logical system of classification; a working basis for the 
ideal scheme which the mind constructs from observed facts. It is 
eminently a rational process. In direct contrast to this is the ver- 
nacular—the loose, quite indefinite, and often haphazard way of 
naming things, that has its root in the soil of common life. The 
stratum out of which it springs is emotional rather than rational. 
In ornithology these two contrasted forms of the embodied ideal— 
the technical or scientific and the vernacular names—have been of 
more equal value than in many other branches of natural history, 
from the fact that birds have always presented themselves to men’s 
minds in a peculiarly attractive way. Most of us think of the various 
kinds of birds, certainly of the more familiar ones, in terms of the 
vernacular rather than in the garb of science. A song sparrow 1s 
a song sparrow more often than a Melospiza melodia as well to 
the ornithologist as to the untechnical wayfarer. 
A respectable antiquity attaches itself to the vernacular. Long 
before the scientific mind had invaded the field of natural history 
the folk had given voice to its ideas about various animate and inani- 
mate things. A vast vocabulary of popular names was an early 
heritage of the common people. With this stock of names and 
notions about Old World birds the colonists in Virginia and New 
England were fairly well equipped, and the more familiar birds of 
the new country soon received names indicative of some trait or 
likeness to certain of the Old World varieties. Mark Catesby in 
his History of Carolina was the first one to give any substantial 
“Reprinted by permission from The Auk, Cambridge, Mass., new series, vol. 
26, No, 4, October, 1909. 
505 
