PRESIDENT S ADDRESS. 
179 
I have confined myself chiefly to the study of British birds, 
because I think a man ought to be thoroughly conversant with 
the Natural History of his own country before undertaking 
that of foreign lands, as a resident has a much better oppor¬ 
tunity of studying the life history of any species than he 
possibly can have when travelling through a strange country. 
The Bibliography of Ornithology is most voluminous, hut 
the majority of works are simply compilations from previous 
authors, and in many instances multiply their errors. I 
trace the cause of this to the fact that it is impossible for 
one man to personally investigate the life of all the species 
of which he gives an account; therefore I strongly advocate 
the publication of monographs instead of works comprising 
all orders of birds. The beautiful woodcuts of Bewick gave 
a great impetus to the study of Ornithology, and the reason 
why his drawings caused such admiration was that in most 
cases the drawings were made from life instead of from 
stuffed specimens, which had been the case in most of the 
previous works. Since the days of Bewick the art of litho¬ 
graphy has been brought to a great state of perfection, and 
now that we have works illustrated like Gould’s, or Sharpe 
and Dresser’s, little is left to be desired. The only improve¬ 
ment I could suggest would he the illustration of the inter¬ 
mediate stages and young birds, instead of the finest adult 
specimens that can he conceived, which are well known, 
whereas many birds of the year, or those undergoing partial 
change of plumage, are little known or appreciated; indeed 
I have known instances where such birds have been thrown 
away as not worth preserving, because not adult, though in 
my opinion such specimens are actually more interesting. 
Yarrell’s “ British Birds,”—of which a fourth edition 
is now being published—with McGillivray’s accurate and 
observant work, will be found sufficient to give a student a 
very fair knowledge of our native avi-fauna. 
As there are two ways in which Ornithology can be 
studied I may consider it under two distinct headings, 
Indoors and Out-of-doors. No doubt a man sitting comfort¬ 
ably in his laboratory can, by the examination of dried skins, 
specimens in spirits, or the anatomical structure and the 
formation of the digestive organs of birds, obtain a large 
amount oi knowledge, and with some degree of certainty 
assign each individual species to its proper family and genus, 
whatever system of classification he may be following, until 
he imagines that he has discovered the natural affinity, and 
forthwith publishes a new system, making confusion more 
confused, forgetting that there is a marked difference between 
