GENERAL HISTORY OF BIRDS. 3 



is the one which has given name to the department of knowledge which treats 

 of birds. 



A contemporary of Shakespeare and the translators of the Bible, named 

 Raphael Holinshed, published in 1577 a list of English animals in his Chro- 

 nicles of England, and, in due course, reaches the feathered class. "Order 

 requireth that I speeke somewhat of the fowles also of England," he says, and 

 these, he continues, "I may easilie divide into the wild and tame." After 

 enumerating the larger, he winds up with the "other fowles" of smaller size, 

 "as Nightingales, Thrushes, Blackbirds, " etc. Here, it will be seen, bird 

 appears as a compound in the name of a small species. 



Bird belongs to what philologists designate as the hypercoristic class or, 

 in plain English, pet names. 



In ancient times — more than a thousand years ago — the English called the 

 young of the feathered class Brid or Bird, the latter form, in time, becoming 

 the prevalent one. The origin of the word is unknown* but it is possible that 

 it was to some extent onomatopoeic and the outcome of a tendency to respond 

 with a trill to and imitate the chirping of the chickens which gathered round 

 the good hen-wife; she wanted to have a talk with them! From application 

 to the young of the familiar fowl it has extended to all the feathered tribes of 

 like size. At length it rivalled the old word Fowl in general usage for the 

 class and tinally displaced it altogether as a general term. 



The branch of science devoted to the consideration of Birds is ornithology. 

 The name is of comparatively recent coinage and has not been traced l>ack- 

 wards of 1655. It is of Greek origin, being from the oblique form (ornith ) of 

 ornis, a bird, and logos, commonly translated as discourse. The Greeks 

 themselves, having no systemized knowledge of the subject, had no use for the 

 term, although the adjective ornithologos (treating of birds) is to be found in 

 Plutarch; it was left for the moderns to make and utilize ornithology. 



But ornithology (under the variant form ornithologie) was originally used 

 in English with a very different signification from that which it now bears; it 

 was with the meaning of talk among birds (about men for example) and not 

 about birds. Its first appearance was in an anonymous work, published at 

 London in 1655, entitled "Ornithologie or The Speech of Birds." It was not 

 until years afterwards that the word was revived with the meaning it now has. 

 The first meaning has been long obsolete; it did not, indeed, survive the 

 work in which it was born and was thus still-born, although several editions 

 of the ornithologie were printed. Professor Newton has given further infor- 

 mation in the short article entitled ornithology in the Dictionary of Birds and 



*The very natural idea that such a form as brid or brede might be derived from brod 

 or brood is declared by Doctor Murray to be baseless "and even the suggestion that it may 

 be formed like these from the root bru- appears to be quite inadmissable" to that grreat 

 philologist. 



