A BIRD-GAZER'S PUZZLES 177 



It must be admitted, moreover, if the trutli is 

 to be told, — and it is sometimes better to tell 

 it, — that no amount of observation in the field 

 will be likely, in a month or two, at any rate, to 

 settle all the nice questions that confront the stu- 

 dent in a new region in these latter days ; espe- 

 cially if the region happens to be, like this about 

 San Antonio, one in which Eastern and Western 

 forms of the same species are to be found over- 

 lapping each other. It was very well for Emerson 

 to speak, poetically, of naming all the birds with- 

 out a gun. He lived before the day of trinomials ; 

 or if that be not quite true, before our younger 

 brood of ambitious closet ornithologists had set 

 themselves so zealously at the work of dividing 

 and subdividing. Time was when a song sparrow 

 was a song sparrow, and there was an end of it. 

 Now to call a bird by that name is only the be- 

 ginning of sorrows. What kind of song sparrow 

 is it ? My Western handbook enumerates about 

 fifteen sub-species, and the differences, I suspect, 

 are many of them almost too fine for opera-glass 

 determiaation. For what I know, a microscope 

 might be more to the purpose. 



The man who refuses a gun must accept the 

 limitations that go with that refusal. Time and 

 repeated observation will do much ; a good ear 

 win help — in some cases it will do the larger 



