PREFACE OF THE ORIGINAL EDITOR. 



IT is certainly the duty of the editor of another person's writings to inform his readers of 

 their contents, and to state the reasons which have induced him to give them the form and 

 arrangement he has selected for them. For this purpose, I must necessarily begin with some 

 account of the studies of the author of the present work, the general circumstances of his life 

 having been already published elsewhere 'by a friendly hand. 1 CHRISTIAN LUDWIG NITZSCH 

 was one of those fortunate natures which recognise early and definitely their vocation in life, and 

 follow it out to the end. But he was also one of those difficult individualities which are not 

 satisfied with the most careful use of all the materials available to them, and which, therefore, 

 never look upon their works as completed until the last fragment of the whole subject-matter has 

 been investigated as carefully as the rest of it. The unavoidable consequences of such attempts 

 (which generally exceed the power of man) are the arrestation of the work itself, the paralysis of 

 the personal forces by the mass of constantly increasing material, and, finally, the arrival of death 

 at a time when the work is still far from finished. And this was the fate of our friend. Addicted 

 from his youth indeed, from the days of his childhood to the study of Birds, he commenced it 

 in his earlier years without any definite plan, and investigated just what struck him as remarkable 

 in these animals. Then, on comparing the collected observations of former days, he soon found 

 presented to him three directions of investigation which still lay untouched, whilst the other 

 branches of the subject appeared to be, if not exhausted, already more or less carefully treated. 

 These were the internal structure, the plumage from certain points of view not then touched upon by 

 systematic Ornithologists, and the parasites. At the commencement of his labours Nitzsch only 

 partially examined the internal structure at first, merely the skeleton and the viscera contained in 

 the cavity of the trunk. In this earlier period he also frequently described only the numerical 



1 In the preface to the ninth volume of Naumann's ' Naturgeschichte der Vogel Deutschlands,' in 

 which a good likeness of Nitzsch is given as a frontispiece. 



