PRELIMINARY NOTICES. 



To write a book that should please every body would not 

 only be hopeless but impossible; that various opinions 

 should be entertained concerning Ornithologia, is what I 

 ought naturally to expect. The value of such a work cannot 

 be immediately known ; but I feel assured that the more it 

 is examined, the more will its statements be found to cor- 

 respond with actual facts in natural history.* I shall, 

 nevertheless, feel grateful to every one who will take the 

 trouble to look into it; and should he find any error in it, 

 none will be more ready to acknowledge and to correct it 

 than myself. 



Aware of the necessity of being careful in a selection of 

 facts in Natural History, I am persuaded that no one can 

 accuse me, justly, of hastily rejecting or of heedlessly adopt- 

 ing whatever may be presented to my notice ; but, as the 

 evidence of my own senses is, to me, the best of all evidence^ 

 I have, as it became me to do, laid no inconsiderable stress 

 upon that in the composition of my Work ; and hence, some- 

 times, my observations are very different from those made 

 by persons who have preceded me in the same path. 



London ; Nov. 15, 1827. J .is. Jennings. 



From the Mag. Nat. History, vol. ii. p. 111. 



To the above Letter I wish to add, that the Reviewer of 

 Ornithologia, in the Magazine of Natural History, has, in a 

 note to my observation, page 285, stating that " the Gold- 



* I might add, in defiance of the nibbling and the cavils of 

 reviewers, that I challenge the whole of our English literature 

 to produce a work of Jive hundred pages in duodecimo, which con- 

 tains such a mass of information on the Natural History of Birds: 

 as I have said, in my letter to Mr. Campbell, " the volume 

 contains the labour of three years, and the accumulation of a life 

 of observation." 



