MANUAL OF INSTRUCTION. 



CHECK LIST OF THE BIRDS OF NORTH AMERICA. 



PRELIMINARY AND EXPLANATORY. 



Both author and publisher of the "Key to North American 

 Birds" intended that the work should contain instructions for 

 collecting and preparing birds, and that a Check List, accord- 

 ing with the author's views, should appear simultaneously with 

 the volume. This proved impracticable : partly because the 

 work so far overran the original estimates, that the additional 

 expense and risk, which the publisher, an accomplished natu- 

 ralist, generously offered to assume, seemed to the author 

 unjustifiable ; and partly because the writer's unexpected call 

 to another field of oflScial duty suddenly threw such a pressure 

 of other engagements upon his hands that he could not just 

 then find time to write out even so slight a treatise as this. 

 The Check List and Manual of Instruction are therefore 

 now presented together, as a Supplement to the Key. 



The demand for a new Check List has become urgent. The 

 last, one published, and only one now in use, expresses a 

 former state of American ornithology. That great changes — 

 presumably for the better — have lately been made, is shown 

 by the fact that, in round numbers, fifty species have been 



