Audubon^s Ornithology, First Volume. 343 



Art, X, — A Synopsis of the Birds of North America ; by John 



James Audubon, F. R. SS. Lond. and Ed., &c. Edinburgh, 



1839. 

 The Birds of America, from drawings made in the United, States 



and their Territories ; by John James Audubon, F. R. SS. 



Lond. and Ed., etc. Vol. I. New York, 1840. 



When the celebrated French naturahst, Buffon, had concluded 

 the ornithological portion of his interesting but visionary and 

 imaginative work on natural history, he announced with all the 

 solemn and dogmatical assurance of even more than Gallic ego- 

 tism, that he had completed the " History of the Birds of the 

 world." The work he had just finished embraced descriptions 

 and the history of eight hundred species of birds from different 

 parts of the globe. Their discovery had been the work of nearly 

 twenty centuries. Their present number seemed immense to the 

 short-sighted votary of science ; and the self-satisfied naturalist 

 looked upon his own handiwork with ecstatic delight, and un- 

 hesitatingly pronounced it to be as nearly perfect and as complete 

 as it was in the power of humanity to accomplish. The student 

 of nature who now attempts to tread the mazy and perplexing 

 labyrinth of modern ornithology, pauses with wonder and con- 

 templates with astonishment, the bhndness or contracted vision 

 of him, who could deem a work "so nearly complete as not to 

 admit of a material augmentation," which he now finds to con- 

 tain hardly a sixteenth part of the species known to inhabit the 

 earth. He can hardly realize, that while nearly twenty centu- 

 ries on the one hand did not furnish the knowledge of one half 

 as many hundreds of species, a single half century has multi- 

 plied that number almost by twenty. 



Nor has this astonishing change been confined to the science 

 of ornithology. The progress of every other of the natural sci- 

 ences during the latter part of the eighteenth, and their advance- 

 ment since the commencement of the nineteenth century, have 

 been wonderful in the highest degree. Not only have all those 

 before recognized as such received such immense augmentations 

 and improvements as to throw their former selves very far into 

 the shade, but even others wholly new but admitted to be dis- 

 tinct sciences, have been brought to light. 



