ORNITHOLOGICAL LITERATURE 
831 
and preservation of skins—in graphic detail. The 
difference between mercenary collectors and 
those employed by museums is explained. The 
concept of a subspecies and the role ot American 
ornithologists in pressing for use ol trinomials are 
discussed. The fifth chapter comprises a long 
discussion of the battle for a single nomenclatural 
system, checklist, and code. Despite Cones 
machinations to garner favorable reviews tor his 
checklist. Ridgway's checklist carried the stand¬ 
ing of the Smithsonian. Coues chaired the lirst 
AOU Committee on Classification and Nomen¬ 
clature. The 1886 publication of the AOU 
Checklist resolved many of the differences 
between the Coues and Ridgway checklists. 
The next chapter covers the era's publications 
about birds. The reader is introduced to Ridg- 
way’sbody of work, including The Birds of North 
and Middle America , started by Ridgway in 1894 
and continuing through 1918, when Part 8—the 
last completed in his lifetime—was published. 
The unfinished volumes, 9-11. were completed 
by Herbert Friedman and the last was published in 
1950, The planned volumes 12 and 13 were never 
published. Lewis asserts (page 211) that Ridgway 
"helped to put the nail in the coffin ot systematics 
as the key means to study birds as a prolession. 
because his work on Bulletin 50 was so definitive 
that it wmuld remain unsurpassed tor decades, 
leaving ornithologists to turn to other venues alter 
Ridgway’s domination of avian systematics. 
That this new profession was coming ol age 
during the emergence of the study ot the role ot 
behavioral characteristics in speciation surely 
played a role; evolutionary shifts in the tocus ot 
biological study respond to the change in resources 
(tools, funding, publishing fashion) as do the 
objects of their study. Moreover. Lewis overlooks 
the enormous resurgence of systematics with the 
advent of tools such as protein electrophoresis, 
PCR, and equipment that sequences genomes while 
biologists go out for a few beers. The significance 
of the chapter, though, is the return to the 
examination of Ridgway's work and file, including 
his move in 1913 to southern Illinois. Lewis 
attributes this move to the desire ot Ridgway and 
his wife to live closer to nature. Ridgway continued 
his work on Bulletin 50 despite failing eyesight and 
poor health. His wife-who had helped him to till 
orders for his color dictionaries by cutting and 
pasting the hundreds of small squares ot color 
samples to the pages of the sell-published Colot 
Standards- died in 1927. 
The final chapter of the book recounts at length 
Ridgway's struggle to describe and standardize 
bird colors. Like others who tried to create such 
standards, he struggled with consistency of pro¬ 
duction of colors and the inability to prevent 
fading of the printed page. His first eftort (1886) 
illustrated 186 colors on hand-painted chips. The 
second was published 26 years later, after many 
false starts. Initially intended to be a Smithsonian 
publication, institutional support and interest 
swelled and waned over the years. When 
published in 1913, the book included 1,115 colors. 
Lewis concludes by noting that Ridgway’s 
approach to the color book was much like that 
of the amateur ornithologists ol an earlier age. He 
eschewed the use of scientific terms, favoring 
lyrical names to describe colors. He eschewed the 
use of phvsics to identify colors by their numeric 
wavelengths. He actively rejected the urging of 
Smithsonian Secretary Samuel Langley to use 
spectral analysis. Thus, the colors are described 
with names as obtuse as ‘elephant's breath or 
•Chapman's blue' rather than chromaticity coor¬ 
dinate 0.3127, 0.3290. The book concludes with a 
chronological list of Ridgway’s publications, 
scientific and popular. 
The book's central premise is repeated across 
chapters at length; it becomes tedious. There are 
several minor errors. For instance, in describing 
the preparation of skins, the anterior orifice is 
described as an unus rather than a cloaca. Lewis 
identifies the Hirundinidae as a family ot 
flycatchers. The more serious problem, however, 
is the assertion by Lewis (page 212) that 
Ridgway was falling out of step with the trend 
in biology to study the living bird, and con¬ 
founding the value of the knowledge to be gamed 
in field studies of living birds with 'popular 
ornithology.’ True. Ridgway himself in 1901 
famously equated the study of behavior with 
‘popular ornithology' in the first volume ol 
Bulletin 50. However, integrative biology was 
just drawing its first breath at that time and it is 
not surprising that a man who devoted all his 
energy to systematics would not have taken note 
of the increasing scientific rigor ot these other 
approaches. In fact, these areas of study were 
also coming to acquire the characteristics ot 
‘professional science' in the development ol 
classification schemes, technical language, and 
publication in scientific journals. The first 
number of the Auk includes a lengthy treatment 
by Bicknell of bird song, who urged that song 
