PRELIMINARY NOTICES. 



tunate as to step out of the via trita, tlie beaten way, in the 

 prosecution of his design. For many and important reasons 

 the author of Ornithologia has thus done. It was not, there- 

 fore, to be expected that a work which, among other novel- 

 ties, lays the axe to the very root of long cherished amuse- 

 ments and inhumanities, sanctioned too by innumerable 

 authorities, poetical and prosaic, plebeian and patrician, 

 could escape some vituperation. Talk of giving up hunting, 

 shooting, and fishing, too, with Sir Humphry Davy's Sal- 

 motiia, and Isaac Walton to boot ! God help the man, he 

 must have taken leave of his senses!!! No, gentle reader, 

 the author does not think that he has yet taken leave of his 

 senses, but he fears that our hunters, our shooters, and our 

 fishers for sport, have long left theirs, or so much would 

 not have been said and written in favour of such silly, inhu- 

 man, and, for the most part, unprofitable pursuits. 



fn regard to the Critics, however, let him not be mis- 

 understood: the most intelligent of that formidable body 

 have borne ample testimony to the value and importance 

 of his work, as the subsequent notices will testify ; others, 

 a few only, whom there is here no occasion to name, have 

 poured out their vials of vituperation, chiefly, it appears to 

 him, because they neither understand nor like the science of 

 ornithology itself; and, also, because they have totally 

 misapprehended the object of the author in combining 

 science with/ami/iar poetry. 



Some of these gentlemen Critics, who appear to know 

 as much of the science of ornithology as an inhabitant of the 

 }>olar regions of North America, have thought proper to 

 abuse the author for the introduction of wcm; terms, although, 

 in the preface to Ornithologiaj he has not said much in favor 

 of such terms; and has, besides, studiously avoided the intro- 

 duction of many of them into the poetical parts of his work, 



