502 CATALOGUE OF THE ACCIPITRES. 



dimensions and colors of the soft parts of adults and young, a 

 brief sketch of its distribution, and a list of the British Museum 

 specimens. To all this he adds a number of woodcuts of heads, 

 bills, and feet, illustrative of generic characters and of coloured 

 plates of the rarer and less known species ; in the present 

 volume there are some sixty woodcuts, and no less than twenty- 

 one species are beautifully figured. 



Lastly, a careful index, specific and generic, worthily 

 completes this first section of the most comprehensive and 

 perfect book of its kind that has ever yet appeared. 



The labour bestowed on this first instalment must have been 

 enormous, and one almost shudders to think of the long, long 

 years of ceaseless toil that the complete enumeration in a 

 similarly thorough manner of the 15,000 species now known 

 will entail. Still the labour will not have been thrown away ; 

 the work will form an era in the science, the point of depar- 

 ture from which all future research will start, the common text 

 book for all ornithologists in matters of nomenclature ; and at 

 the early age at which Mr. Sharpe (alone and unaided, 

 by the sheer force of talent, perseverance, and industry) has 

 raised himself to the distinguished position he now holds, we 

 may well hope that he will not only live to complete this 

 present -undertaking, mighty as it seems, but to give the world 

 hereafter, when we older ones have passed away, something 

 greater and better than we have yet dreamt of. 



Of course no work of this magnitude can, in the present 

 state of science, be entirely free from errors, and doubtless 

 sharp eyes in Europe will detect some slips here, some omis- 

 sions there, and many will be found to dispute this identifica- 

 tion or deny the correctness of that union of two forms hitherto 

 accepted as specifically distinct ; but taking the work as a whole, 

 no impartial and competent judge will be found, I am certain, to 

 dispute the extreme care and conscientiousness Avith which the 

 work has been carried through, or the immense value of the 

 resulting catalogue. 



As a fact, there is nothing like it in existence. Professor 

 SchlegeFs pamphlet catalogues of various families of birds 

 constitute the nearest approach to it ; but these, valuable as they 

 are, habitually give no descriptions, very rarely anything like a 

 satisfactory one, and avowedly omit all species not contained 

 in the Ley den Museum. 



Ornithologists (like most of us in India) working apart from 

 the great centres of European civilization, to whom ornitho- 

 logical libraries are not available, will find Mr. Sharpe's cata- 



