IV PREFACE. 



names, and I have always had a great sympathy with the pro- 

 posal of Mr. Seebohm to adopt only the best-known name for 

 a species, but the " auctorum plurimorum " system of nomen- 

 clature, though very good in theory, would not work well in 

 practice, for a name in a majority one year, might turn out to 

 be in a minority two years hence, and so there would again be 

 no stability in our nomenclature. 



It is certainly unfortunate that so many older names for 

 common species have been unearthed during recent years, 

 but that is surely not the fault of the authors themselves, 

 but of their descendants, who have not taken the trouble to 

 search the whole of the literature. I have used in the present 

 " Handbook " such names as I believe to be not only the right 

 ones, but those which in future are most likely to be adopted 

 by ornithologists generally; and I cannot agree with Dr. Sclater 

 that, because this little "Handbook" is "confessedly in- 

 tended for popular use, it would have been wiser to adhere 

 to ordinary nomenclature and to avoid an unnecessary multi- 

 plicity of genera." This is exactly what I think ought not to 

 be done for in a book which has such a wide sale as the 

 " Naturalist's Library," it is more important to teach the 

 reader the nomenclature most likely to be in vogue in the 

 future, than to serve up to him names which a very little study 

 on his part will enable him to discover to be out of date. 



Mr. Harting has also written a friendly notice of my first 

 volume in the "Zoologist" for 1894 (pp. 468-472), but he 

 also complains that there is so much that is " new " in the 

 book. It really looks as if he had allowed much recent work 

 to escape his notice, and has only just woke up to the fact that 

 things have been moving since he wrote his "Handbook to the 

 Birds of Great Britain " in 1872. The arrangement followed 

 in my book was duly set forth by me in my " Classification of 

 Birds" in 1891, and there is therefore nothing wonderful in an 

 author following his own ideas. The same may be said of Mr. 

 Harting's remarks on my nomenclature, and if he had studied 



