346 Trotter, English Names of American Birds. fort* 



AN INQUIRY INTO THE HISTORY OF THE CURRENT 



ENGLISH NAMES OF NORTH AMERICAN 



LAND BIRDS. 



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 ex- 

 pression 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 

 vernacular — 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 is 

 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 in- 

 animate 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 account of American birds, and his work contains an 



