Vol. xxxvn 



1919 J 



Dwight, Larus hyperboreus. 



247 



Fig. 2. Bill of average Larus hyperboreus, male, life size, drawn to scale. The 

 broken line shows the bill of the alleged race. 



So far as I can see the case of barrovianus stands where it did in 

 1906 and it is a pity that there should have been any need of reopen- 

 ing it. Fortunately the merits of this and similar cases do not 

 rest upon individual bias, but they are determined by the A. O. U. 

 Committee which, as far as North American birds are concerned, 

 acts somewhat as a supreme court rendering verdicts according to 

 evidence presented. Let us hope they will give us " safe and sane" 

 subspecies rather than the shadowy indefinite groups of averages 

 that too often are named as geographical races. It should be 

 remembered that while a name is a handle to a fact, too many 

 handles would make a door or a basket perfectly useless. Orni- 

 thology will become a wilderness of handles if every difference is 

 named at sight, — a wilderness of subspecies founded more on 

 hasty opinions than on digested facts. A step farther and we 

 shall have the psychological subspecies in which the expectant 

 mental attitude of the subspecialist (if I may be pardoned the 

 word) will play the most important role. In our gropings after 

 the truth it is wasteful of too much time to spend so much of it 

 stumbling over names of groups so poorly defined that they convey 

 only a vague meaning to a few specialists and none at all to every- 



