97 
PEALE’S EGRET HERON. 
caused them to be taken until lately for distinct species: fortu¬ 
nately this source of confusion has been removed; and the females 
have been ascertained to be similar to their males. The species 
of Europe and Northern Asia were therefore upon good grounds 
reduced to two, the Great and the Small, A. alba and A. Garzetta; 
but both formerly, and one even till now, were confounded with 
their two American analogues described by Wilson. In my 
“Observations on the Nomenclature” of that author, as well as 
my subsequent writings, without excepting my Synopsis, I admit¬ 
ted the two North American species, and added as a third, the bird 
now represented in our plate, but I also erred in considering the 
large Ameiican species as the same with the large European! 
they are in fact no less distinct from each other, however closely 
related, than Ardea candidissima and A. Garzetta. The name 
of alba belongs to the European, and that of egretta to the 
American; although Illiger, Lichtenstein, (and Temminck ?) not 
perceiving that it was the legitimate egretta of Gmelin and 
Latham, and having applied that name to the European alba, have 
given the American the new one of A. leuce. 
Mi. Old, in the second edition of Wdlson’s Ornithology, was 
therefore right in doubting the identity of the two species, and I 
was mistaken when I declared his doubts unfounded: but he ought 
not to have quoted as synonymous A. egretta of Temminck, &c. 
Indeed, I am unacquainted with a single instance in which upon 
due examination the rule will not hold good, that no bird is com¬ 
mon to both continents that does not inhabit during summer the 
high northern latitudes, and the Ardea alba and A. egretta are not 
winter birds, but on the contrary summer visitants of Europe and 
the United States, and do not even then range far to the North: 
the European moreover is chiefly found in the east, and hardly 
ever seen in the west of that continent. This alone ought to have 
led us to detect the discrepancy. In order to clear up this point 
VOL. iv.— b b 
