INTRODUCTION. 
IX 
As it turned out, however, this stipulation was not one of so much practical 
importance as had been expected, since the cost of the publication of the “ Land 
Birds of North America ” was so great that the publishers of that work would 
have been unwilling to continue it at their own risk and expense — and, in 
fact, did decline to do so, when, after the stoppage of the California Survey, the 
present work was offered to them for publication by joint consent of the authors 
and the former State Geologist of California. The latter, however, having devoted 
himself, subsequently to the second and final stoppage of the Survey in 1874, 
to a continuation — chiefly at his own ri.sk and expense — of the publication 
of the material left in a more or less fragmentary condition in his hands, finally 
concluded to take up the unfinished volumes of Ornithology; and, with the 
generous co-operation of the Director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, 
now presents them to the public, as forming at the same time a portion of the 
series of Memoirs of that institution, and a continuation of the Reports of 
the Geological Survey of California. 
As in the previously published volumes of the North American Birds, the 
technical or descriptive portion of the present division of that work has been 
prepared by Messrs. Baird and Ridgway ; and the latter has had the opportunity 
of making, during the printing, such additions and corrections as were rendered 
necessary by the fact that several years have elapsed since the manuscript was 
originally prepared for publication. The biographical portion of the volumes 
devoted to the Water Birds is from the pen of Dr. T. M. Brewer — who, however, 
did not live to see the beginning of the printing of this, the final, portion of 
a work on which he had bestowed so much labor. The task of revising his 
not entirely completed manuscript has fallen upon the undersigned, who has 
endeavored to do the best he could with it, especially as regards the occasion- 
ally somewhat uncertain orthography of the names of persons and places. In 
this he has had the assistance of Mr. J. A. Allen, of the Museum of Comparative 
Zoology. 
The illustrations of this volume were, with few and unimportant exceptions, 
drawn upon the wood by Mr. Edwin L. Sheppard, of Philadelphia, and engraved 
by Mr. Hobart H. Nichols, of Washington. The coloring of the heads was 
done under the direction of Mrs. F. H. Russell, of Brookline, Mass., from patterns 
prepared by Mr. Ridgway. 
J. D. WHITNEY. 
Cambridge, Mass., March 31, 1884. 
