NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS. 279 
have any criticism to offer which could in any sense of the word 
be considered adverse, but it would have been a pleasure, did 
space permit, to review such portions of the work as deal with 
what ornithologists would call ‘‘moot points,’ and indicate 
perhaps here and there certain matters of interest upon which 
further particulars might have been desirable. 
If we have one cause for regret, however, it is to see the way 
in which it has been thought necessary to alter the classification 
to which we have been so long accustomed, and which we have 
had, so to say, ‘‘at our fingers’ ends.” The result is that it is 
now, with four volumes, much more troublesome to find a given 
species, which we could formerly always turn to without any 
reference to the index. Obviously, perhaps necessarily, it has 
been thought desirable, where practicable, to indicate the 
relationship of groups by placing them in juxtaposition ; hence 
one is not surprised to find in this new edition the Plovers 
placed near the Sandpipers in the order Limicole, and the 
Sandpipers near the Gavie or Gulls. But then arises a difficulty 
where to locate the Herodiones. It seems to us that the Herons 
and Storks are quite as much out of place in their new position, 
between the Divers and the Geese, as they were in former edi- 
tions, between the Plovers and Sandpipers. They would appear 
more naturally, we think, between the Rallide and the Grude, 
for in some respects there is as much resemblance between the 
Rails and Little Bitterns as there is between the Herons and 
the Cranes. This would not interfere with the Cranes being 
placed next to the Bustards, to which family they are more 
nearly allied than they are to the Herons. But it is much 
easier to find fault with the new classification than to propose a 
better, and it cannot be said that Mr. Saunders’s view, as 
defended in his ‘‘ Preface ” (p. vii), is unreasonable. 
A noteworthy feature in the present edition is the large 
number of species (many of them figured) which have been 
introduced as new to the British avifauna since the publication 
of the third edition in 1856. The omission of certain New 
World Passeres, which, as Mr. Saunders says (Preface, p. viii), 
“cannot reasonably be supposed to have reached our shores 
without human agency,’ is no doubt wise. The rejection of a 
few others which appear to us to have been admitted into the 
list of British Birds upon the very slenderest, not to say 
