June 7, 1883] 



NA TURE 



127 



masterly way in which he executed the fifth volume of 

 the British Museum " Catalogue of Birds." 



The present volume, however, will appeal to a class of 

 readers very different from those who study the high and 

 dry literature above-named, and even those accustomed 

 to the well-written pages of Prof Newton's edition of 

 " Yarrell's British Birds," will find delight and instruction 

 in the volume now issued by Mr. Seebohm. 



The first part contains an account of the Birds of prey, 

 and the Thrushes, and considerable novelty is introduced 

 in the style of nomenclature of these two groups. First 

 of all we notice that Mr. Seebohm gives up the idea of 

 Orders in the class Aves. Although commencing with 

 the Birds of prey, the time-honoured opening •' Order 

 Accipitres" is absent, and we are introduced to the 

 family Falconidce instead, and we consider that it is in 

 the classification adopted and in certain points of the 

 nomenclature that the weak spot lies in this otherwise 

 admirable work. 



Mr. Seebohm is the kind of man who would speak 

 disrespectfully of the Equator ! With unremitting energy 

 he charges full tilt against what he considers the abuses 

 of scientific nomenclature in the present day, and not 

 content with heartily belabouring those who differ from 

 him, he returns to the assault on every possible op- 

 portunity, " fights all his battles o'er again, and thrice 

 he slays the slain." He is quite furious with the rules 

 propounded by the Committee of the British Association, 

 and rebukes the authors, promoters, and followers of these 

 rules with unabatef vigour, but with perfect sincerity, as 

 is exemplified by the following sentence in his " Notice to 

 Subscribers," where he writes : — '' If I have criticised the 

 work of any of my fellow ornithologists too severely, I 

 ask their pardon, and hope that they will pay me back in 

 my own coin by correcting my blunders with an un- 

 sparing hand. The object of all true scientific work is 

 the elimination of error and the attainment of truth." 



We can promise Mr. Seebohm that, as one of the 

 authors most severely atta:ked in his volume, we shall 

 accept the above challenge, and shall not hesitate to pay 

 him back in his own coin when occasion arises, trusting 

 to the strength of the late Marquis of Tweeddale's dictum, 

 that it is "by the flails of disputation that the truth is 

 threshed out." And yet this is not an easy book to 

 criticise. There is so much that is elegant in the treat- 

 ment of the subject, and the work is so evidently done con 

 amore, that in reading it through one is apt to lose sight of 

 the irritating attacks on one's own writings in the admira- 

 tion which the general style of the book compels ; never- 

 theless there are several points on which it is impossible 

 to agree with the author. 



To drop the idea of Accipitres as an Order, and treat the 

 Birds of prey as a simple family, suggests that the author 

 has only a limited acquaintance with this group in its 

 entirety, and this is a failing which appears throughout Mr. 

 Seebohm's work, viz. that he is apt to judge of the classifica- 

 tion of birds from a knowledge of Palsearctic forms alone, 

 without any consideration of the mass of birds which are 

 extra-Palasarctic in their habitat. This remark would be 

 perhaps unnecessary did not the author aim at such a 

 high standard. Thus his families are provided with 

 ■" Keys to the genera," which, as Mr. Seebohm is nothing 

 if not seeking after natural affinities, may be supposed to 

 give the author's matured opinion on the relations of the 

 genera. We can only wonder, therefore, at the importance 

 attached to the characters which ally Falco with Vultur 

 (in the same primary section of the Falconidce), and place 

 the Ospreys as intermediate between the Falcons and the 

 Swallow-tailed Kite. The Falcons and the Honey-kites 

 are united by such forms as the Neotropical Harpagus, 

 the Indo- African genus Baza, and other forms, but what 

 Pandion has to do with any of them we fail to see 

 entirely, and so far we have not seen any reason to 

 modify our opinion expressed in 1874, that the Ospreys 



are co-ordinate with the Falcons and the Owls, and 

 form an intermediate group between these two. We 

 should have thought, too, that at least as good characters 

 could have been found to separate Neophron from Vultur, 

 as some of those employed by Mr. Seebohm for distin- 

 guishing other genera of his family Falconidae. 



In the much-vexed question of the Jer-Falcons Mr. 

 Seebohm brings in his favourite theory of interoreeding, 

 and accounts for the variation in plumage between the 

 different races on this score with much ingenuity and 

 some show of success, but we must totally dissent from 

 his view of the Iceland Falcon being an intermediate 

 form (F. gyrfako-candicans). To our mind it is quite as 

 good a race as the true Jer-Falcon of Scandinavia, and 

 has a perfectly distinct habitat. In Greenland the case 

 may be different, and it is by no means improbable that 

 the resident Jer-Falcon of Southern Greenland, Niero- 

 falco hoelboelli, Nob., sometimes crosses with the Arctic 

 white Jer-Falcon (H. candicans), and that the result is 

 seen in those specimens which are so numerous in collec- 

 tions, and whose exact specific position it is difficult to 

 define ; nevertheless fully adult birds, both of H. candi- 

 cans and H. hoelboelli, are very easily recognised, but 

 Mr. Seebohm's theory of hybridisation carries a strong 

 probability. 



In the article on the Peregrine Falcon the author sounds 

 the first note of the trumpet which is to carry the charge 

 into the enemy's lines and work havoc and destruction 

 among the followers of the British Association rules of 

 nomenclature. Mr. Seebohm asserts (and he is probably 

 right) that the Falco gentilis of Linnaus, founded on 

 Albin's Falcon Gentle, is absolutely the oldest-known 

 name for the Peregrine, if the above rules are to be 

 carried out to the bitter end. In the year 1767, a posthu- 

 mous work by Gerini, who cuts a great figure throughout 

 Mr. Seebohm's book, contained the name Falco pere- 

 grinus for the species, and as this is also the best known 

 one, it is adopted by Mr. Seebohm as being that "auctorum 

 plurimorum." By the simple process of using that name 

 which has been employed by the majority of standard 

 ornithological writers, the author settles all vexed ques- 

 tions as to priority, and does away with the difficulties of 

 nomenclature arising from the discovery of a prior name 

 in some long-forgotten " musty tome " by some diligent 

 bibliographer. In the present case Gerim' s book cannot 

 be invested with the authority which Mr. Seebohm claims 

 for it, because, as Prof. Newton has lately shown, the 

 work was the result of the labours of three collaborateurs 

 who published it in 1767, Gerini himself having died in 

 1 75 1. The work is generally quoted by authors as the 

 " Storia degli Uccelli." 



We must candidly confess that Mr. Seebohm's plan of 

 selecting the best known names for a species of bird has 

 much to recommend it, and in the present volume the 

 result is in general satisfactory, as it restores to many of 

 the common European species the names by which they 

 are most familiar to the general public. At the same 

 time this rule of adopting the nomenclature auctorum 

 plitrimoruiii requires great care in its application, and it 

 will probably be found to work better in the case of Euro- 

 pean birds than in the less-studied species of other 

 countries. The whole subject is deserving of earnest 

 thought, but for our own part we cannot entirely free 

 ourselves from the idea that a certain amount of injustice 

 will be done to the labours of many of the early writers 

 in ornithology whose names have been overlooked by 

 their successors, but who scarcely deserve to be passed 

 over entirely, as their work might be up to the standard 

 of knowledge of the times in which they lived We can- 

 not help seeing throughout Mr. Seebohm's volume that 

 justice to the labours of the forerunners in ornithological 

 science is not tempered with mercy to those who have 

 endeavoured in all sincerity to fix the earliest recognisable 

 names to the species of European birds. We must regret 



