506 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1909. 
account of American birds, and his work contains an array of 
names, some of them more or less familiar in the speech of to-day. 
To William Bartram we owe a large number of our common bird 
names, names that reached the intellectual world of eighteenth 
century England through the works of Edwards, Pennant, and 
Latham. Alexander Wilson was likewise a large debtor to Bartram 
for the names of numerous species, but he blazed his own trail by 
applying names to species discovered by himself as well as in the 
recasting of many Bartramian names. 
In the present inquiry I have arranged the matter of the history of 
our American bird names under the following six heads: 
I. Names of old English origin applied to American birds. 
II. Names derived from a Latin equivalent. 
III. Names suggested by voice. 
IV. Names suggested by some peculiar habit or habitat. 
V. Names suggested by color or other external feature. 
VI. Names suggested by geographical locality (place names) or 
in honor of some person. 
I. NAMES OF OLD ENGLISH ORIGIN. 
Many of the Catesbian.names of birds undoubtedly originated in 
the vernacular of the colonists and some are clearly of old English 
ancestry. In the main they are of generic rather than of specific 
application, as is the case with most of the folk terms for natural 
objects. The specific distinction is often one of locality merely, as, 
for example, “the cuckow of Carolina.” Relationship is often 
broadly recognized by the people and embodied in a general name 
with appropriate qualifications to indicate minor differences or 
differences in distribution. The “species” of the profanum vulqus, 
however, more nearly corresponds to the generic conception of the 
naturalist, even in some cases to the idea embodied in the term 
“family.” 
A number of these Old World bird names, given to American birds, 
appear very early in the history of English speech. In a vocabulary 
compiled by Archbishop A¢lfric toward the close of the tenth cen- 
tury (955-1020 A. D.) there is a Nomina Avium in which a number 
of bird names appear, though somewhat different from their modern 
form. In this list the robin redbreast is called “rudduc” or “ rud- 
dock,” which long continued to be its general English name and is 
probably still alive in local dialects. The word appears as a variant 
of the modern “ ruddy,” referring no doubt to the russet of the bird’s 
breast. The earliest recorded instance of the use of the popular 
epithet, “robin,” which as a word of endearment has been trans- 
ferred to many different birds throughout the English-speaking 
