Audubon’s Ornithology, First Volume. 343 
. X.—A Synopsis of the Birds of North America; by Joun 
James Aupuzon, F.R. SS. Lond. and Ed., &c. Edinburgh, 
1839. 
The Birds of America, from drawings made in the United States 
and their Territories ; by Joun James Aupuson, F. R. SS. 
Lond. and Ed., ete. Vol. I. New York, 1840. 
Wuen the celebrated French naturalist, Buffon, had concluded 
the ornithological portion of his interesting but visionary and 
imaginative work on natural history, he announced with all the 
solemn and dogmatical assurance of even more than Gallic ego- 
tism, that he had completed the “ History of the Birds of the 
wo rd. ” ‘The work he had just finished embraced descriptions 
and the history of-eight hundred species of birds from different 
parts of the globe. Their discovery had been the work of nearly 
twenty centuries. ,Their present number seemed immense to the 
short-sighted votary of science ; and the self-satisfied -naturalist 
looked upon his own handiwork with ecstatic delight, and un- 
hesitatingly pronounced it to be as nearly perfect and as complete 
as it was in the power of humanity to accomplish. The student 
of nature who now attempts to tread the mazy and perplexing — 
labyrinth of modern ornithology, pauses with wonder and con- 
templates with astonishment, the blindness or contracted vision 
of him, who could deem a work “so nearly complete as not to 
admit of a material augmentation,” which he now finds to con- 
tain hardly a sixteenth part of the species known to inhabit the 
earth. He can hardly realize, that while nearly twenty centu- 
ries on the one hand did not furnish the knowledge of one half 
as many hundreds of species, a single half century has multi- 
plied that number almost by twenty. 
Nor has this astonishing change been confined to ‘ba science 
of ornithology. The progress of every other of the natural sci- 
ences during the latter part of the eighteenth, and their advance- 
ment since the commencement of the nineteenth century, have 
been wonderful in the highest degree. Not only have all those 
before recognized as such received such immense augmentations 
and improvements as to throw their former selves very far into 
the shade, but even others wholly new but admitted to be dis- 
tinct sciences, have been brought to light. 
