10 PREFACE BY THE EDITOR. 



to comply with these requests, he came to New 

 York, and proposed to me thal^ 1 should assist 

 him in the necessary composition of the work. 

 Perceiving the vast fund of practical knowledge 

 he had amassed, and knowing that the book 

 would form a most valuable contribution to sport- 

 ing literature, I gladly acceded to his proposal, 

 and the result of our combined and conscientious 

 labors is now before the public. 



I believe this is the first work of the kind 

 that was ever undertaken by a thoroughly prac- 

 tical man, and strictly confined to the knowledge 

 and information derived from his own observa- 

 tion. It would have been very easy to make 

 the book twice as large as it is, by' copying, 

 with or without credit, as is the custom, long 

 extracts and descriptions from the standard authors 

 of natural history in this country, but to what 

 useful end 1 ? These matters have been copied by 

 one author after another about a dozen times 

 already, and readers have been so provoked by 

 the everlasting repetition of Latin names for 

 familiar birds, that many must have been on 

 the point of pitching the pedantic copy-books 

 into the fire. In this work another method has 

 been followed altogether. Here are the observa- 



