mudie] 
BRITISH ORNITHOLOGY 
423 
to have been a student of botany and ornithology, who made 
extensive collections of the birds of Cornwall and Devon. 
He assisted Ray, as is acknowledged in the preface to the 
second edition of the Synopsis Methodica Stirpium Britanni- 
carum. Unfortunately the whole of his library, annotated 
books, and MSS. were destroyed by fire in 1808, so that 
practically all we have preserved to us is what is to be found 
in his Works undernoted. 
1726. The | Works | of | Walter Moyle Esq : | none of which were ever | 
before published. | In two volumes | [Yol. II.] | London [etc.] 
1726. 
Collation — 2 vols. 8vo. Yol. I. [not so stated on title], pp. 
xi + 1 1. errata + contents 4 pp. un. + pp. 430. Vol. II. pp. 2 un. + 
pp. 390 + index, pp. 19 un. 
Note. — Contains in Yol. II. Letters to Dr. Tancred Robinson 
“On a Cornish Bird, called a Petrel ” ; Dr. Sherard’s three 
letters on Natural History, and Mr. Moyle’s answers. 
Mudie (Robert), 1777-1842 
This author will always be remembered by his popular 
little work on The Feathered Tribes of the British Islands . In 
the preface to the original edition, he states that “ I have 
formed no system, I have followed no systematist, I have 
drawn up no nomenclature of shapes or of colours, and I 
have not counted the feathers or the scales or the reticulations 
on the tarsi , of a single bird.” The work undoubtedly 
contains original life histories which have been praised by 
past critics, but we fear that some part of the existing demand 
for the work is due to the Baxter-type vignettes on the title- 
pages of the first edition. Mudie also wrote a Natural History 
of Birds (1834), a small general history of birds which boasted 
a Baxter-type frontispiece, and many of the articles in the 
Natural History Division of the British Cyclopaedia , con- 
ducted by C. F. Partington (10 vols. roy. 8vo, 1834-38). His 
history of Hampshire deals more scantily than might be 
expected with the birds. Mudie also wrote the description 
of Selborne in Blyth’s edition of 1850 of The Natural History 
of Selborne. 
