278 
Lord Walden on Mr. Allan Hume’s 
a reflection on Jerdon. And yet Mr. Hume's tender and dis¬ 
interested solicitude for Jerdon's reputation does not prevent 
him thus writing of Jerdon “ that owing to his ill health in 
later years and his disregard for the literary side of his work" 
his “ merits " “ have been greatly underrated;" and further 
on “ I admit that his hook embodies many grave errors 33 (t. c. 
p. 5) . His “ merits underrated 33 ! By whom, where ? Not 
in Europe, surely not throughout India ! “ Disregard for 
the literary side of his work 33 ! to he said of a man whose 
extraordinary acquaintance with the literature of his subject is 
displayed in all he wrote. Extraordinary in Jerdon, for in 
his day communication with Europe was infrequent and the 
land was not flooded, as now, with manuals and hand-books 
whereby the most shallow can attain with small exertion a 
smattering of facts sufficient to babble about under the name 
of science. “ Grave errors "! It may be so. I have not 
detected them. But Mr. Hume says so. Dr. Einsch does 
not*. Mr. Blyth, with whose conclusions Dr. Finsch is not 
always in accord, was, while in India, essentially a cabinet 
naturalist. During the many years of his Indian sojourn he 
hardly quitted f the four walls of the museum his genius, 
knowledge, industry, and indomitable energy raised to the 
highest rank. Of the fourteen species of the genus Palceornis 
enumerated by Dr. Finsch he knew, previous to 1868, in 
the wild state, at the most only four—P. torquatus, P. cyano- 
cephalus of Bengal, P. eupatrius, and P. melanorhynchus. As 
caged birds he may occasionally have seen two more—P. 
schisticeps, and perhaps P. longicaudatus. 
Let us now take each of the species of the genus Palceornis 
in the sequence followed by Mr. Hume, and examine into the 
merits and justness of his criticisms. First comes Palceornis 
eupatrius (Linn.) =P. alexandri (Linn.) of Jerdon, Blyth, and 
the older Indian writers, subdivided by Mr. Hume in his Re¬ 
view, and for the first time, into three distinct species. Mr. 
* No man, with so long a career, made fewer bad a species ” than Dr, 
Jerdon, proof by itself of bis knowledge of bis subject. 
t I believe be only made two excursions of any importance—one to the 
Midnapur jungles and, much later, on account of illness, one to Burma. 
