108 RAY AND SOME OF HIS FELLOW-WORKERS 



broke at Winfield in Westmoreland, the menagerie in 

 the Tower of London, the repository of the Royal 

 Society, and the museum of the Tradescants. A decoy 

 for wild ducks is described with the help of rude figures.^ 

 The snaring of pheasants and the daring of larks are 

 explained, as well as the classification of hawks by ^ 

 falconers. V| 



Willughby and Ray had little sense of the relative 

 value of zoological characters ; it gives a sufficient idea 

 of their judgment in this matter that they sometimes 

 divide their birds according to size, colour, the nature 

 of the food, the length of the leg, wildness or tameness. 

 For the mere naming of such species as are not finely 

 graded their divisions and sections, which are accom- 

 panied by a key, may have answered pretty well. 



They are not careful to mark the birds which are 

 described for the first time, but the Whooper Swan, the 

 Herring Gull and the Black Diver (our Common Scoter) 

 they claim as hitherto undescribed. They note that 

 the trachea enters the keel of the sternum in the 

 Whooper, as previously observed by Aldrovandi, but 

 not in the tame swan. 



Willughby and Ray explain in their preface the usage 

 which they adopted in this and other books on natural 

 history with respect to the names of what we now call 

 genera and species. They took little trouble, they say, 

 about nomenclature, and usually followed Gesner and 

 Aldrovandi, being unwilling to disturb accepted names. 

 Their chief care was to make it quite clear what bird 

 was denoted by a particular name. They were indiffer- 

 ent whether the name was Latin or English, of one word 

 or several. Thus we have *' Fulica, the Coot," but the 



^ p. 372. More elaborate figures are given in Bewick's Water Birds and in 

 Yarrell's Birds. 



