INTRODUCTION. 



THE plan followed in the descriptive portion of this work 

 has, I trust, the merit of simplicity. A brief account is 

 given of the appearance, language, and life-habits of all the 

 species that reside permanently, or for a portion of each year, 

 within the limits of the British Islands. The accidental 

 stragglers, with the irregular or occasional visitors, have been 

 included, but not described, in the w r ork. To have omitted 

 all mention of them would, perhaps, have been to carry the 

 process of simplification too far. And as much may be said 

 of the retention in this book of Latin, or ' science ' names. 

 The mass of technical matter with which ornithological works 

 are usually weighted is scarcely wanted in a book intended 

 for the general reader, more especially for the young. Nor 

 was there space sufficient to make the work at the same time 

 a technical and a popular one : the briefest description that 

 could possibly be given of the characters of genera would 

 have occupied thirty to forty pages. The student must, in 

 any case, go to the large standard works on the subject, 

 especially to those of Yarrell (fourth edition), Seebohm, and 

 Howard Saunders, which are repositories of all the most 

 important facts relating to our bird life, gathered from the 

 time of Willughby, the father of British ornithology, down 

 to the present. 



The order in which I have placed the species, beginning 

 with the thrushes and ending with the auks, is that of 



