URAL OWL. 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—Drcuanp. 
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 families of the 
feathered tribes. 
Linneus 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 
