A BIRD-GAZER'S PUZZLES 177 



It must be admitted, moreover, if the truth is 

 to be told, and it is sometimes better to tell 

 it, that no amount of observation in the field 

 will be likely, in a month or two, at any rate, to 

 settle all the nice questions that confront the stu- 

 dent in a new region in these latter days ; espe- 

 cially if the region happens to be, like this about 

 San Antonio, one in which Eastern and Western 

 forms of the same species are to be found over- 

 lapping each other. It was very well for Emerson 

 to speak, poetically, of naming all the birds with- 

 out a gun. He lived before the day of trinomials ; 

 or if that be not quite true, before our younger 

 brood of ambitious closet ornithologists had set 

 themselves so zealously at the work of dividing 

 and subdividing. Time was when a song sparrow 

 was a song sparrow, and there was an end of it. 

 Now to call a bird by that name is only the be- 

 ginning of sorrows. What kind of song sparrow 

 is it ? My Western handbook enumerates about 

 fifteen sub-species, and the differences, I suspect, 

 are many of them almost too fine for opera-glass 

 determination. For what I know, a microscope 

 might be more to the purpose. 



The man who refuses a gun must accept the 

 limitations that go with that refusal. Time and 

 repeated observation will do much ; a good ear 

 will help in some cases it will do the larger 



