MANUAL OF INSTRUCTION, 
AND 
CHECK LIST OF THE BIRDS OF NORTH AMERICA. 
PRELIMINARY AND EXPLANATORY. 
Boru 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 Cueck 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 official 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 Cueck List and Manvat or Instruction are therefore 
now presented together, as a Supplement to the Key. 
The demand for a new Cueck 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 
MANUAL. 1 
