4 CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES [Proc. 4TH Ser. 
i 
HISTORIC, SKETCH 
THE PRE-COUESIAN PERIOD: To 1866 
PRioR to the publication of Dr. Coues’s monograph in 1864 
and 1866, the literature pertaining to the albatrosses, petrels, 
and diving petrels was at best fragmentary. The impress of 
Linnzeus upon the group in the tenth and twelfth editions of 
his Systema Natur@ is very slight; only five of the eight spe- 
cific names proposed by him are tenable. Johann Friedrich | 
Gmelin, “an industrious, indiscriminate compiler and tran- 
scriber,” in 1789 in volume one, part two, of his edition of the 
Systema Nature considerably increased Linnzeus’s list. The 
source of Gmelin’s information was mainly the third volume 
of Dr. John Latham’s General Synopsis of Birds, published in 
1785. In this work Latham did not apply “the principles of 
binary nomenclature,” and therefore his names of species have 
no standing in technical ornithology. In his Index Ornitho- 
logicus, which appeared in 1790, Latham bestowed Latin 
binomial names upon his birds. Nevertheless, only one name 
survives in the group we are considering, for he was fore- 
stalled by Gmelin, who followed the Linnzan system of 
naming, thereby gaining a foothold in the nomenclature. 
Latham’s name is inseparably connected with the ornithol- 
ogy of Captain James Cook’s three voyages, and the present 
narrative would be incomplete without some further allusion 
to these voyages. On the first voyage, which lasted from 
1768 till 1771, Cook was accompanied by Sir Joseph Banks 
and his four assistants, Dr. Daniel Carl Solander (a disciple 
of Linnzus) and three artists, one of whom was Sydney 
Parkinson, in whose honor Parkinson’s Petrel in later years 
was named. Parkinson made the drawings of the birds and 
Solander wrote the descriptions and selected the names. Banks 
and Solander returned in safety, but Parkinson and the other 
artists died on the voyage. Solander after his return to Eng- 
land elaborated his original notes on the albatrosses and petrels 
into extensive Latin descriptions ready for the printer, but he 
died in 1782, leaving them unpublished. Recently these manu- 
script descriptions have been discovered in the British Museum 
