^O COUES 071 Ornithofhilologicalities. [January 



quite natural and proper; indeed we should have admired alike his erudi- 

 tion and his authority. But it is otherwise now that we have forgotten all the 

 parts of speech in learning in the school of linguistic experience that the 

 rules of Latin and Greek grammar are the masters of boyish students and 

 the servants of scholarly men. While it is not necessary for us to stand 

 super grammaticam to object to the rule of the ferule, yet, were this posi- 

 tion required, we should not hesitate to assume it with entire confidence in 

 our ability to maintain it. We have been too long in the green-room 

 of philology to be deeply affected by the glare of the footlights. Thank- 

 ing our genial critic for this pleasant reminder of our college days, which 

 brings up the scenes of our youth and almost makes us feel young again ; 

 assuring him of the perfect good nature with which we take his shingle 

 full of philological holes, we nevertheless beg to amuse ourselves in turn 

 by playing the professor. We own the soft impeachment of "that divine 

 seeking which longs to be right and know why it is right"; we confess a 

 "positive passion" to learn how to express our thoughts in a manner 

 worthy of ourselves, of the discoveries our critic has made, and of the 

 beautiful science of philology which he loves. Wherefore, we beg to 

 dissent in general terms from the tone and tenor of Professor Merriam's 

 remarks, and to disagree with him in sundry particulars. 



(a) Professor Merriam's review of the 'Coues Check List of North 

 American Birds,' is a piece of obvious hypercriticism from beginning to 

 end. It is pitched upon a philological E-string instead of the natural A, 

 and then fiddled above the bridge. Every scholar will recognize the 

 skill with which this is done, and we bear witness alike to the care with 

 which Professor Merriam has guarded his points, and the soundness upon 

 which they rest. But it is a canon of criticism, which practised book- 

 reviewers recognize, and which we suspect Professor Merriam has yet to 

 learn, to hold in view always what the author undertook or intended to 

 accomplish, not what the reviewer thinks the author might, could, would, 

 or should have done. For example : We wrote a little book to explain 

 the meanings in English of some 1200 or more foreign words from almost 

 every language under the sun — chiefly Grseco-Latin, but also barbarous 

 in every degree of barbarity. We addressed a clientele some percentage 

 of which required to be informed that caput and K€(|>aX.T] mean head, and 

 that the genitive oi caput is capitis^ and that K£4>a\'n' is cephale in Latin 

 letters.* We also tried to patch up or do away with some of the worst 

 atrocities of bird-Latin, as far as the rules of zoological nomenclature 

 (which we perceive that Professor Merriam knows nothing about) would 

 permit us to do so, in fact taking liberties in this particular which many 

 zoologists have already resented. We were furthermore hewing our way 

 where no one had gone before in any systematic manner, with few fingei"- 

 posts off the common dictionary highway, again and again forced to 

 fall back upon our instincts of philological locality and our linguistic 



*In fact, the most serious defect of our 'Lexicon' is, that we did not transliterate the 

 Greek characters. 



