SPECIFIC CHARACTEllS OF BIRDS. 
337 
can be any great merit in observing what any person, who 
has the right use of his eyes, may see, is by no means 
my intention. I shall^ on the contrary, be happy to find, 
when I have better opportunities of extending my reading, 
that others may have fostered the same ideas. 
The specific characters, not only of birds, but of qua- 
drupeds, fishes, reptiles, and other animals, is a subject, 
which, so far from being reduced to any sort of precision, 
exhibits a melancholy proof of the very limited progress, 
which, after all our labour and ingenuity, often misapplied, 
has been made in systematic arrangement. Until we be- 
come acquainted with the ultimate causes of things, until 
we have traced the whole machinery of the animated sys- 
tem, and can look around from the centre of life, as it 
were, upon all that complication of forms and actions which 
emanate from it, we can never attain perfection in system. 
At present our modes are exceedingly awkward and insuf- 
ficient, and even lead not unfrequently to false conceptions. 
How to characterise a specific form, including the two pri- 
mary divisions of sex, and the various modifications of 
those divisions, existing in the different relations of age, 
and of forms and quahties, induced or altered by changes 
in circumstances, of climate, food, air, and other causes, is 
what we know as little, as to resolve the complicated phe- 
nomena of mind to their simple elements. 
The specific characters of birds are commonly taken 
from adult males, in their spring plumage. A character 
of this kind, therefore, it is obvious, cannot apply in ten 
cases out of twelve, to the female, or other division of the 
specific form ; and much less to the young birds of dif- 
ferent years or months. As I have just observed, we can 
have no hope of becoming so intimately acquainted with 
the organization of animals, as to be able to fix upon cha- 
racteristic differences, that would include the whole va- 
