PREFACE 



This book contains materials for research in greater 

 measure than it presents the results of it ; and, accordingly, 

 it is not my purpose to preface it with an extended summary 

 of the many wide generalizations to which the assemblage 

 of fact and legend here recorded may seem to lead. This 

 book indeed includes only a small part of the notes I have 

 gathered together since I began years ago, as an under- 

 graduate, ignorant of the difficulties of the task, to prepare 

 the way for a new edition of the Natural History of the 

 Philosopher. Three points, however, in my treatment of 

 the present subject deserve brief explanation here. 



Instead of succeeding in the attempt to identify a greater 

 number of species than other naturalist-commentators, dealing 

 chiefly with the Aristotelian birds, have done, I have on the 

 contrary ventured to identify a great many less. This limita- 

 tion on my part is chiefly due to the circumstance that I have 

 not ventured to use for purposes of identification a large class 

 of statements on which others have more or less confidently 

 relied. A single instance may serve to indicate the state- 

 ments to which I allude. In the Historia Animalium 

 (especially in the Ninth Book, great part of which seems 

 to me to differ in character and probably in authorship from 

 all but a few isolated passages of the rest of the work), in 

 the works of such later writers as Pliny, Aelian and Phile, 

 and scattered here and there in earlier literary allusions, 

 we find many instances recorded of supposed hostility or 

 friendship between different animals. When we are told, 



