4640 Tue ZooLocist—OcToBER, 1875. 
is in what relates to observational Ornithology—I mean the carrying 
on of scientific ornithological observations. We have out-of-door 
ornithologists by dozens, but it seems to me that they go on exactly 
in the same way as our predecessors used to do, each trying to find 
out everything for himself instead of taking their ascertained facts 
as a starting-point, from which they can ascertain new ones; con- 
sequently observational Ornithology is almost at a standstill. In 
nothing is this deplorable want of progress so manifest as in all 
that relates to the migration of birds—that mysterious subject of 
which we really know very little more than our forefathers did. 
Because in days gone by Gilbert White and others of happy 
memory were careful to record, year after year, the dates of arrival 
and departure of the swallow, the cuckoo, the woodcock, and all 
the rest of our common migrants, these excellent contemporaries 
of ours consider not only that they must needs do the same, but 
they are moreover content not to do any more. They forget that in 
White’s time the great object was to prove or disprove the existence 
of migration at all. But nowadays no one in his sober senses doubts 
the fact of migration—what we want to know are its cause or causes, 
the manner in which, and the faculty whereby, it is performed. 
Hundreds of records will not bring us nearer to the solution of any 
one of these three problems; but even if they did it is clear that 
they could not have that issue until they were tabulated in some 
intelligible system, such, for instance, as that which Dr. von Mid- 
dendorff adopted in his remarkable treatise, ‘ Die Isepiptesen Russ- 
lands.’* But no one has ever attempted this for the British Islands, 
and consequently the columns and columns of recorded dates 
remain perfectly useless. I do not mean to say that the result of 
Von Middendorff’s laborious researches is such as to make one very 
hopeful of much good following from the digestion and arrangement 
of similar records in Britain; but, until these have been so treated, 
it is impossible to say what will come of it. I will only be so bold 
as to declare what lL believe will not come of it, and that is the 
answer to any one of those questions I but just now mentioned. 
Again, out-of-door ornithologists of the present day, with some few 
bright exceptions, neglect the subject of partial migration, the in- 
vestigation of which is more likely than anything else to reveal the 
* «Die Isepiptesen Russlands, Grundlagen zu Erforschung der Zugzeiten und 
Zugrichtungen der Végel Russlands,’ St. Petersburg, 1855. 
