352 Auduhon^s Ornithology, First Volume. 



ists in many inextricable problems in American ornithology. 

 Thus, for instance, the Falco lineatus of Graelin, our common 

 red-shouldered hawk, he would find variously described as the 

 young or the old of the F. hy emails, as a distinct species, etc., and 

 he might read over the pages of Bonaparte, Wilson, Nuttall, as 

 well as the two first volumes of Audubon's text to his larger 

 plates, changing his mind at each authority to which he referred, 

 and at last be utterly unable to decide amid the labyrinth of con- 

 flicting testimony. But the work before us would solve his 

 doubts, by telling him that both were but varieties of the same 

 bird. The same would be the case with the rough-legged hawk, 

 which he would here find to be but one bird, although multiplied 

 into the Falco niger, F, Sancti-Johannis, etc. And so with a 

 large number of birds to which we have not room to refer, at the 

 length we could wish ; the confusion in which they had become 

 entangled being such as to throw no slight obstacles in the way 

 of him who attempts to wade through them without assistance. 

 We would therefore, from a strong sense of the want of it, ad- 

 vise a cheap republication by Mr. Audubon of his Synopsis. 



The remaining work is one of a much more extensive charac- 

 ter than the other, being a full and complete history, so far as 

 present knowledge on the subject extends, of all the known spe- 

 cies of the birds of North America. It is designed as a republi- 

 cation of his great work in such a form and at so reduced a price 

 as to render it accessible to very many who were shut out from 

 the other, with all the additions not only of new species, but also 

 of new facts relative to those before known, and the Whole scien- 

 tifically arranged. The entire work, embracing colored plates — 

 miniatures in most instances of his large work — as well as the 

 text incorporated with them, is published at a cost of less than a 

 tenth part of the expense of his former publication. It is issued 

 in numbers, each containing the plates and descriptions of five 

 species of birds. The first volume, embraced in fourteen num- 

 bers, and consequently containing seventy species, is, thus far, all 

 yet published. It forms, however, adequate means of judging 

 of the character of the entire work when published. As it will, 

 in all probability, be for years to come the standard of American 

 ornithology, it deserves our careful consideration as a scientific 

 work on one of the most popular of the natural sciences. 



