174 Stimvier Studies of Birds and Books chap. 



Fringilla, or Finch, and to the species ecelehs, which 

 all naturalists recognise at onco to mean the 

 Chaffinch. If we had no other name but Chaffinch 

 to give it, it would be hopeless to try and make 

 any one but an Englishman understand what we 

 mean ; and indeed there are millions of English 

 people who would not recognise it by that name. 

 They would probably know the bird if you called it 

 a Twink ; but even then you could not be certain 

 that you had conveyed to them the idea of the right 

 bird, because the country people are apt to call other 

 birds besides the Chaffinch by this very old and 

 favourite name. 



Now Aristotle was just in the position of a man 

 who wants to tell people what books there are in a 

 great collection, which is scattered in confused piles 

 over the floor of an immense room, without any shelves 

 to arrange the books in. Those shelves, i.e. the names, 

 were not made for another two thousand years ; and 

 it is perhaps doubtful if they could have in any 

 case been easily made without the aid of the Latin 

 language, which was at that time still in a rude and 

 semi -barbarous condition. And I suppose this is 

 partly why Aristotle preferred the study of the 

 physiology of animals to that of their classification 

 and description ; and certainly this is why it is often 

 so very hard for us to follow him when he speaks of 

 individual species. He notes, perhaps, a few par- 



