Brrpd KILLING IN ORNITHOLOGY. II 
the viscera, the same precisely) of each bird at the moment of his 
death; from which to infer the infinite metabolism of each. It 
will never obtain any more than this infinitesimal, abstracted from 
a previous subject-matter. And any bird escaping the slaughter 
will be lost to science. Yet all this self-defeat is logically the out- 
come of any unrestricted preference for study of the dead bird, 
once the actuality of the type-bird has been disproved. And in- 
deed there is at present a surprising tendency among scientists to 
kill birds under just such an assumption that infinite exhibits are 
ideally the goal. 
Thus, so long as the type-theory held good, it was a legitimate 
and feasible undertaking, perhaps, to exhibit some example of 
every one of the definite number of types acknowledged. It still 
is so, for purposes of ellipsis or pedagogy. But such a collection 
is no longer relevant to the study of bird-metabolism; as most 
collectors practically acknowledge. For there is now, correctly 
enough, no limit in the collectors’ eyes except in available birds 
(or extrinsic considerations) to the numbers weeded for chronicling 
variability. Whether or no other considerations deter the collect- 
ing, every living bird is a variation from all others, and no collec- 
tion is complete without him. ‘The arrangement of variations in 
large graded series, exhibitive of tendencies, is more and more 
painfully incomplete the more we realize that live birds still re- 
main to tend into new serial variations. Some pretence is still 
made in serial collections that a limit to numbers is not per se a 
failure. But this contention is a relic or avowed admixture of the 
type-standard, limiting the possibility of novelty to predetermined 
ranges. Whereas, the more accurate is one’s discrimination in the 
matter, the more obvious it is that the entire collection is a series, 
whose gaps ih the known are continuously filled with demonstrable 
ancestral forms; but whose “beyond” or “indemonstrable ” is 
the living bird. It is mere common sense to say that there is no 
limit, so long as a single bird or pair remains alive, to the actual 
insufficiency of the modern serial collection as a chronicle of 
tendencies. The scheme is per se a flat failure unless all birds 
are killed. Wherefore a collection cannot be justified at all except 
on the obsolete type-scheme; a scheme whose pedagogic value 
