Annals of the Transvaal Museum 
189 
standard of environment prevailing in Europe. Ridgway, in his work 
above-mentioned, has acknowledged that evolution is an accepted fact, 
and it is no doubt because of this that his work marks so great a progress. 
In Britain and Europe, however, we still hear voices raised in query as to 
whether evolution really is a truth, and hand in hand with this we find 
“genus lumping”; it is also to be noted that these questioners believe that 
genera are merely a “convenience,” and from this we must presume that 
they cannot find time to investigate. It is safe to say that if these system- 
atists who believe in taking the line of least resistance could be induced 
to examine the material they handle with a little more care, taking note 
of all the differences between the species or individuals and noting whence 
the specimens came, it would not be long before they acknowledged the 
truth of evolution. Science cannot tolerate prejudice which has its origin 
in laziness, and if present workers cannot shake off this shackle, the future 
generation will do so, so that it is useless to disclaim against the “incon- 
venience” of recognising many genera in birds. 
Soon after starting my work in the Transvaal Museum, it became 
apparent, to me that there was something lacking in the current text-books 
on birds, and as time progressed I found the solution in the lax way in 
which the genera were allocated. Soon after, I was pleased to note that 
another worker had made the same discovery, namely Mr G. H. Mathews, 
who started a great work on the Birds of Australia in October, 1910, taking 
the nomenclature in current works for granted as correct ; but as his labour> 
progressed we find a gradual change taking place in succeeding volumes as 
it became more and more obvious that the generic arrangement of the 
species was not a natural one, until at last he found it necessary to make 
wholesale changes. He has shown so clearly the advantage of “genus 
splitting” that one marvels how the systematists of Europe and Great 
Britain can still be content to move along in the old course; yet they still 
do so, and the classification of the birds of Europe, Asia and Africa is still 
behind the times in consequence. I sincerely hope, however, that this order 
of things will be changed and we shall find prejudices giving way to the 
production of better work. The main argument that genera are merely a 
matter of convenience cannot be taken seriously, as those who hold this 
view still retain innumerable generic names that might quite well be rele- 
gated to synonymy if the argument be carried to its logical conclusion; 
and the argument that according to the arrangement of the “genus 
splitters” every species at once becomes a genus is no better, since we must 
take into account the potentiality of many species to traverse great dis- 
tances, so that we cannot expect to find many species amongst such genera, 
though there are often many amongst the local birds that are incapable 
of travelling far. 
It was my intention to publish a long introduction to show my reasons 
for coming to the conclusions hereafter given, but the review and most 
important part of this paper has become so lengthy that I have decided 
to curtail this and give merely an abstract. I have been guided to a large 
extent by the obvious way in which the species in families naturally fall 
into groups, some of which are distributed over the small area of South 
Africa, others over the continent and others again over the whole universe. 
In stud3dng these groups one becomes impressed with a number of features 
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