OUNITHOLOGY. 



appeared in the relations, of those voyages. The trutii indeed com- 

 pels us to observe, that there was scarcely one of the feathered race 

 procured in the course of those perilous voyages that were not 

 illready well known to every British Ornithologist as inhabitants 

 qf our own country, through the medium of various publications, 

 -and of our own among the number, nor any that were not to be found 

 sextant for years previous to that period in our own Museum ; and 

 this in point of candour can be considered only as a priority of 

 .publication, since every naturalist had been invariably allowed an 

 (Unreserved access to that extensive depository of Natural History *. 



* Captain Sabine in his Memoir on the birds of Greenland, inserted in 

 the 12th volume of the Linnaean Transactions, enumerates fifty-four species? 

 twenty-eight of which he observes had passed under his own observation* 

 and of the remaining twenty-six species which he did not meet with, six he 

 remarks were not even seen by Fabricius, and others are unquestionably 

 rare in Greenland. -This enumeration of the Arctic birds is useful and 

 valuable, because it leads us to an extensive knowledge of the Ornitholo- 

 gical productions of those inhospitable regions, but we conceive it will not 

 be deemed amiss to add, that very nearly the whole of the fifty-four species 

 therein enumerated are natives of our own country, though many are very 

 rare ; forty-eight of the species were included in our Museum, and pro- 

 bably the remainder, but under some other appellations ; and so far from 

 this northern voyage, so interesting in some particulars, having been pro- 

 ductive of much novel information to the English naturalist, we may also 

 add, that the greater part of those had appeared several years before in our 

 work entitled " The Natural History of British Birds." There is a total 

 silence among all the writers who have treated upon the subject of those 

 northern acquisitions, as well respecting our collection of those birds as the 

 publication in which they are described and figured, that may fully justify 

 our observation, a silence we ought not most likely to impute to illiberality 



but certainly at least to a want of information. Perhaps it may be 



considered that Larus Sabini was an exception to the generality of this 

 remark, but it was not, a specimen of this interesting bird, which had been 

 killed in England in the winter of the year 1807, had a place in our collec- 

 tion for the space of some years, under the name of Larus nigripcs. 



