NATURE AND THE LABORATORY 121 
explains that it had been his ambition for twenty 
years to provide descriptions more detailed and 
more correct than any previously offered: 
“To accomplish so ambitious a purpose, I 
judged it necessary to direct my attention to the 
living objects themselves, rather than to their skins 
in collections, or their portraits in books, to follow 
them in their haunts, observe their manners, procure 
unmutilated specimens, carefully examine all their 
parts, and thus be enabled to bring forward facts 
that had been entirely overlooked, and place others 
in a light in which they had not previously been 
viewed.” 
To some zoologists field work has seemed 
a necessary but irksome condition of subsequent 
laboratory work; to MacGillivray the laboratory 
work was a means to making the field work more 
intelligible. He points out, for instance, that the 
dissection of the alimentary system throws light 
upon the habits and haunts of the bird. By his 
thorough anatomising he made field work more 
significant for those who have neither inclination 
nor aptitude for anything else—and the restriction 
is an entirely legitimate one. But for the serious 
student, who would be a scientific ornithologist, 
MacGillivray’s advice is clear and wholesome : 
“Let us betake ourselves to the fields and 
woods; let us traverse the hills and valleys 
together; let us there study our favourites, pursue 
them from brake to bush, procure as many as we 
need, and returning to our homes, inspect their 
exterior, look closely to their bills, feathers, and 
