4 
Lost British Birds. 
sight of them even by travelling long distances and spend¬ 
ing many days in waiting and watching. The eagles and 
buzzards and kite ; the raven, chough, grey lag goose, great 
skua, roseate tern, dotterel, bearded tit, Dartford warbler— 
what are the lives of such species as these really worth ? It 
would be idle to retain them in a work on British birds which 
is not intended to be out of date one or two decades hence. 
This done, a couple of hundreds of species will remain in the 
work, which, in its sadly mutilated condition, will better 
deserve its title; and the conviction will by this time have 
forced itself on its owner, that we have a very mag¬ 
nificent bird population on paper, but a very poor one in 
reality. It should be added that of this reduced number 
(200), a large proportion are never seen by those whose life 
is confined to land : they are pelagic, and only to be met with 
out at sea, or in the neighbourhood of those “ naked melan¬ 
choly isles ” which so few of us, however great our love of 
birds may be, are ever able to visit. 
The saddest feature in the case is that invariably the 
finest species are the first doomed: they have indeed been 
and are being selected for slaughter “for the handsomeness 
of the same.” By placing side by side two sets of draw¬ 
ings, representing, in the one case, species that are gone 
and are going, and, in the other, such as are common, an excel¬ 
lent objectdesson can be had. The greatly reduced black and 
white drawings in this pamphlet give but a faint idea of the 
wonderful beauty of the types represented. Let the reader 
turn rather to the magnificent coloured illustrations in Lord 
Lilford’s work on “ British Birds,” and look out these thir¬ 
teen lost types, and as many others representing species on 
the verge of extinction—twenty-six in all; then compare 
them with the drawings of twenty-six predominant species, 
that are in no danger of extirpation. He will realize, as 
he never realized before, the greatness of the change which 
is going on in the character of our bird population. He 
will see that the noblest and most beautiful forms, all those 
which gave greatest lustre to our wild bird life, were first 
singled out for destruction; that the next in order of merit 
