275 
Review of Dr. Finsctis ‘ Die Papageien 
in the centre of India. If the author of the excellent paper* 
in which this appears {t. c .) had only been allowed to follow 
Jerdon this blunder would have been avoided. 
All through the Review there runs an endeavour to resus¬ 
citate fallacies, long since refuted and buried in Europe, con¬ 
cerning the superiority of one class of naturalists over another. 
Mr. Hume has noticed a tendency on the part of the com¬ 
pilers of other me As observations to exalt themselves above 
the observers,” etc. (t. c. p. 26) and a great deal more in the 
same imaginative strain, the outcome of but groundless though 
honest delusions. Can any one of my readers find among the 
past or daily writings of European naturalists a parallel to the 
exalted and vaniloquent self-assertion of this “ humble student 
of many branches of Natural History ” (t. c. p. 26) ? Some 
stray sentiments contained in the concluding paragraphs of his 
Review are, though devoid of novelty, unimpeachable. But 
from the general drift of Mr. Hume’s criticisms it is to be 
gathered that the men whose position, by choice or accident, 
enables them to live for a period of years in a country where 
certain animals are indigenous, and who, by means of their 
native collectors or by their own hands, are able to convert 
them into specimens from “ the flesh,” are immeasureably su¬ 
perior to the man who endeavours to evolve order out of chaos, 
and to marshal the disconnected often ill-digested and some¬ 
times erroneous observations made by them. It is the old 
squabble between the belly and the members, and is certainly 
unworthy of discussion. But I venture to maintain that 
workers in the cause of any science are superior or inferior 
according to the amount of knowledge possessed by them of 
their special subject. To be a “ trustworthy ” field naturalist, 
who is after all only an observer of a single class of pheno¬ 
mena, he must have acquired, by long and assiduous study, all 
that has been recorded as observed by former naturalists. 
He must not only have a thorough knowledge of his own 
branch of natural history, but he must possess a more than 
general acquaintance with every other branch. By this means, 
and this only, will he know what to observe and how to ob- 
* R. M. Adam, u Notes on the Birds of the Sambhur Lake.” 
