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president’s address. 
An immense amount of work must be done before the history of 
some of the species of birds of prey which breed in our own little 
group of islands can be regarded as complete. Anything more 
hopeless than the sixteen pages devoted to the races of the Sparrow 
Hawk in Dresser’s ‘ Birds of Europe ’ it would be impossible to 
conceive. I admit that it is not an easy task to reduce such a chaos 
of facts to order, but it will have to be done. The classification 
and nomenclature of local races or sub-species is a task of so 
much difficulty that few ornithologists care to grapple with it. 
I venture to think that the American ornithologists have grappled 
with it very successfully. Much as I disapprove of their blind 
adherence to the law of priority, of the fatal mistake which they 
made in altering the year behind which names were not allowed 
to be unearthed, of their tendency to cut up genera wherever they 
can find a crack wide enough to put in a knife, and of the worthless 
characters upon which many of the genera are made, I cannot 
help feeling profound admiration for the way in which they have 
handled the subject of sub-species. I admit that now and then 
they have got into a muddle, but I am not sure that Nature herself 
does not now and then make a muddle of her sub-species. I think 
their system of trinomial nomenclature is the nearest approach to 
perfection to which we can possibly attain ; and I have no hesitation 
in saying that the reason why it is not more adopted in this 
country is that English ornithologists (more shame to them) are 
too lazy to take the trouble to understand the question, and too 
prejudiced against anything American (for which the vulgarity of the 
American press may possibly be some excuse) to form an unbiased 
opinion if they did master the facts of the case. 
Be this as it may, there can be little doubt that the local 
variation of American species of birds is far better understood 
than the local variation of European birds. 
There are two points which have by no means been sufficiently 
insisted upon by writers on birds. One is the remarkable 
extent of the variation (which is apparently caused by difference of 
climate) which may occur within a species having a very wide 
range, but which cannot be regarded as a specific variation, because 
