Coues’s History of the Evening Grosbeak. 
69 
size, drawn and colored in William Swainson’s well-known style, 
accompanies the notice to which I refer ; the remainder of the 
account in the work just named consisting of the junior author’s 
fanciful speculations on the quinary affinities of this remarkable 
Grosbeak. His ingenuity brings him to the sage conclusion that 
the bird is related to certain tenuirostral types, notwithstanding 
that it has one of the largest, stoutest, stockiest bills to be found 
in the whole Fringilline assemblage. 
It is sometimes interesting, and it may not seldom become edify- 
ing, to look back through the perspective of time and see how the 
heaviest artillery of the systematists may turn to Quaker guns, 
when thus viewed through the telescope reversed. It is no less 
profitable to ponder how the disputes of the schools arise in partic- 
ular ways of looking at things that never change, and are fostered 
by the varying idiosyncrasies of individuals who aspire to solve 
the sifent, persistent, unending mysteries that Nature will never 
fully reveal to man’s unaided understanding. We play a game 
of chess with brilliant pieces of natural workmanship, each on a 
checkered field of his individual experiences, all too small for the 
full development of the game, yet quite too large for us to cover 
successfully ; and the most we may indulge a hope of, is the barren 
victory of a perpetual stale-mate. We shift and shift positions, but 
can never extricate ourselves. Thus Bonaparte wrote in 1828 : 
“ The Evening Grosbeak is .... so precisely similar in form to the 
Hawfinch-type of the group, as to defy the attempts of the most de- 
termined innovators to separate them”; and in 1850 he established 
a genus Hesperipho?ia upon a basis which he had thus declared not 
to exist. We seem to be no wiser after than before such events as 
these, in anything that pertains to our actual knowledge of the 
Evening Grosbeak. 
Let us turn another page of written history respecting the sub- 
ject of the present notice. The statements of fact I have made are 
all staple accounts, copied by each successive compiler with no less 
scrupulous exactitude than I have myself exhibited. Quite a fresh 
differs from the male, spoke from insufficient evidence, and Richardson, making 
note of this inadvertence, committed another error. The subject was not recti- 
fied until Audubon described and figured the female from specimens and infor- 
mation furnished him by Townsend. The female obtained by Audubon from 
Townsend was marked “Black Hills, June 3, 1824,” and therefore missed 
being the earliest specimen of which we have any account by only one year. 
