REGISTRATION AND LABELLING 33 



§ 5.— EEGISTEATION AND LABELLING 



A mere Outline of a Field Naturalist's Duties would be in- 

 excusably incomplete without mention of these important matters ; 

 and, because so much of the business of collecting must be left to be 

 acquired in the school of experience, I am the more anxious to give 

 explicit directions whenever, as in this instance, it is possible to do so. 



Beeopd youF Obsepvations Daily. — In one sense the specimens 

 themselves are your record, — ^rima facie evidence of your industry 

 and ability ; and if labelled as I shall presently advise, they tell no 

 small part of the whole story. But this is not enough ; indeed, I 

 am not sure that an ably conducted ornithological journal is not 

 the better half of your operations. Under your editorship of 

 labelling, specimens tell what they know about themselves ; but 

 you can tell much more yourself. Let us look at a day's 

 work : You have shot and skinned so many birds, and laid them 

 away labelled. You have made observations about them before 

 shooting, and have observed a number of birds that you did not 

 shoot. You have items of haunts and habits, abundance or scarcity; 

 of manners and actions under special circumstances, as of pairing, 

 nesting, laying, rearing young, feeding, migrating, and what not ; 

 various notes of birds are still ringing in your ears ; and finally, 

 you may have noted the absence of species you saw a while before, 

 or had expected to occur in your vicinity. Meteorological and topo- 

 graphical items, especially when travelling, are often of great assist- 

 ance in explaining the occurrences and actions of birds. Now you 

 know these things, but very likely no one else does ; and you know 

 them at the time, but you will not recollect a tithe of them in a few 

 weeks or months, to say nothing of years. Don't trust your memory; j 

 it will trip you up ; what is clear now will grow obscure ; what is 

 found will be lost. Write down everything while it is fresh in 

 your mind ; write it out in f uU ; time so spent will be time saved 

 in the end, when you offer your researches to the discriminating 

 public. Don't be satisiied with a dry-as-dust item; clothe a 

 skeleton fact, and breathe life into it with thoughts that glow ; let 

 the paper smell of the woods. There's a pulse in a new fact; catch 

 the rhythm before it dies. Keep off the quicksands of mere 

 memorandum — that means something " to be remembered," which 

 is just what you cannot do. Shun abbreviations ; such keys rust 

 with disuse, and may fail in after times to unlock the secret that 

 should have been laid bare in the beginning. Use no signs intel- 

 ligible only to yourself ; your note-books may come to be overhauled 

 by others whom you would not wish to disappoint. Be sparing of 



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