xviii INTRODUCTION. 



the rest are nowhere. It will scarcely be disputed by any competent and 

 impartial judge that Macgillivray stands alone as the solitary genius in 

 the list ; but even the great Scotch ornithologist can never be compared 

 with Naumann, at least in the result of his work. We must, however, 

 remember that the father of German ornithology enjoyed exceptional 

 advantages; not only did he inherit from a long line of ancestors the 

 "deutsche Griindlichkeit," with which "English thoroughness" cannot 

 compete, because the former has developed into head-work and the latter 

 into hand-work, but he inherited from his father a special taste for orni- 

 thology, and reaped the fruits which his father had planted. 



In speaking of Macgillivray in such high terms, I am not unmindful of 

 the writings of Wolley. If an ardent love of a subject, indomitable energy 

 in its pursuit, and average ability in describing the details of discovery be 

 regarded as proofs of genius, then Wolley was a genius; but his orni- 

 thological career was suddenly closed before the world knew that it had 

 begun. Wolley has never had justice done him. If the ' Ootheca Wol- 

 leyana,' of which a fragment appeared twenty-one years ago, had ever been 

 finished, the ornithological world would be in a much better position to 

 form a correct opinion of the greatness of their debt to him. No valid 

 reason has ever been assigned for the delay; but possibly Newton was 

 shipwrecked on the rocks upon which I myself have nearly foundered 

 namely, the impossibility of obtaining by the aid of chromolithography a 

 satisfactory representation of a bird's egg, either in consequence of incapacity 

 to draw correctly, to colour truly, to gradate the shade evenly, to print 

 carefully, and to register accurately, or from inability to overcome the 

 mechanical difficulties connected with the process. 



It is very easy to find fault with the ignorance and carelessness of others, 

 to grieve over their pedantry in the matter of nomenclature and wrong- 

 headedness in the matter of genera, to marvel at their blindness on the 

 question of the intergradation of species or their inability to see straight 

 on the question of classification, to lament their indifference to the inter- 

 esting points connected with the moulting of birds, the changes which take 

 place in the colour of the feathers themselves, or the series of plumages 

 which intervene between the newly hatched young and the fully adult. It 

 is very easy to express one's profound disappointment at the uninteresting 

 character of one History or the prosy style of another, but it is quite a 

 different thing to write a book which shall not be open to criticism of 

 the same kind. It is difficult to estimate the extent of one's own igno- 

 rance until an attempt be made to transfer one's knowledge to paper, 

 and then to compare it with the work of Macgillivray or Naumann, 

 and discover what a profusion of facts, personally known to these writers, 

 one is obliged to quote at second-hand. In my own work I have tried to 



