URAL 0"\VL. 115 



Specific Characters. — Head large and much feathered; facial 

 disc round; eyes small; tail very long and tapered; plumage brown, 

 varied with white above; white spotted longitudinally with brown 

 below. Length twenty-three inches. — Begland. 



The Owls form a family perfectly distinct and natural. 

 In their external form, in their internal anatomy, and 

 in their habits, they are placed by the wisdom of their 

 Creator a group isolated among the members of the 

 feathered tribes. 



Linnaeus and Cuvier, and after them Temminck, 

 formed but one genus of these birds in their systems 

 of classification. Modern ornithologists have divided 

 them into at least eleven. Again I ask with all defer- 

 ence, is Science benefited by this somewhat pedantic 

 extension of a simple and precise nomenclature? "It 

 is high time," writes one of my correspondents, a well- 

 known ornithologist, and moreover a learned and classic 

 writer, ''that a stand should be made against a system 

 like this." I quite agree with him. I am confident 

 the more we complicate objects in Natural History, in 

 any branch of the Science, with a multiplicity of names, 

 which however elegant and comprehensive, are unneces- 

 sary or devoid of simplicity, the more surely do we 

 throw impediments in the path of those for whom all 

 our systems are drawn up, and all our books written — 

 the students of Nature. Holding these opinions I shall 

 remain content with the views of the really great men 

 to whom I have alluded, and recognise in this work 

 but one genus for the Owls. 



The Ural Owl is a native of the Arctic regions. It 

 is common in Lapland and the Ural Mountains. Ac- 

 cording to Meisner, as quoted by Temminck, it inhabits, 

 though in small numbers, the cantons of Berne and the 



