338 Recent Ornithological Publications. 



1865, pp. 222, 223). Mr. Kennedy has produced a work so 

 creditable * that he must forgive us if we, in criticizing it, refuse 

 " that indulgence which/^ he tells us, " is naturally looked for 

 by an author of sixteen/' and, regarding him as one of riper 

 years, disallow him even the excuse of a " first fault." Where he 

 has erred, however, it is almost entirely through following bad 

 examples set him by those who ought to have known better j 

 for instance, he includes {p. 154) the Golden Eagle, as a bird 

 of Berkshire, partly on the word of Mr. Morris, who, in his 

 ' History of British Birds' (vol. i. p. 20) asserts that an indivi- 

 dual of this species was killed in the county. Mr. Morris, ac- 

 cording to his custom, does not cite his authority for the state- 

 ment ; but if any one will take the trouble to refer to the passage, 

 he will find it almost a literal transcript from a paragraph 

 in the ' Zoologist' (1847, p. 1695), wherein the editor of that 

 journal unfortunately departed from his usual excellent practice, 

 and admitted to his pages an anonymous extract from a local 

 newspaper, which, of course, is totally valueless as evidence in 

 such a case as this. Every one who has had any experience in 

 these matters knows that whenever an Eagle happens to be 

 murdered in an English county, the purveyors of provincial 

 intelligence almost invariably announce it as a Golden Eagle, 

 though in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it is, naturally, the 

 commoner species. It is certainly possible that Mr. Kennedy 

 has investigated this instance ; but if so, he should have told us 

 he had, and thus relieved himself from the obloquy of being even 

 the innocent victim of a mischievous compilation. Mr. Kennedy, 

 we must state, successfully invalidates a second similar assertion ; 

 but he gives currency to a third, which seems to us to require 

 proof that the gamekeepers concerned were able to discriminate 

 between species of the genera Aquila and Haliaetus. Though 

 there is a pardonable desire on the part of the author to admit * 

 species to his book on evidence apparently very slender, we 

 should be misleading our readers if we induced them to suppose 

 that stories of this kind made up a principal part of it. Mr. 



* The Birds of Berkshire and Buckinghamshire : a Contribution to the 

 Natural History of the Two Counties. By Alexander W. M. Clakk 

 Kennedy, " An Eton Boy." Eton and London: 1868. 8vo, pp. 232. 



