A Hand-Book to the Birds of Great Britain, Vol. 4 (Classic Reprint) - Softcover

Excerpt from A Hand-Book to the Birds of Great Britain, Vol. 4

On the conclusion of my "Handbook" I should like to say a few words, principally in reply to some friendly criticisms. The plentiful crop of works on British Birds, which springs up year by year and apparently flourishes, renders it almost an impossibility to write a book on the subject on altogether new lines, as the story of our native birds is being told by a hundred authors in a hundred different ways. Within the restricted limits allotted to me in the "Naturalist's Library," it was manifestly impossible to produce a monographic work, and therefore I chose the form of a 'Handbook,' a method which possesses its advantages and disadvantages. Such a work cannot he exhaustive, and I have therefore only tried to make it useful, and I offer a few remarks by way of an "Apologia."

Nomenclature, - The names adopted for the species have been much criticised. Much of this criticism has been prompted by pedantry, and a sort of hero-worship for the work of the ancients, more by a child-like ignorance of the principles of scientific nomenclature, and still more by a wilful and narrow-minded intolerance of anything that seems to be "new." As a matter of fact, nothing in my system of nomenclature is "new," and any one who says so does but display his ignorance of recent ornithological literature. It is, however, encouraging to find that in the best-known popular journals, and even in the best scientific publications of this country, little fault has been found with the method of my "Handbook," but a general onslaught has been made upon the nomenclature I have adopted. To the reviews in the scientific journals I have scarcely any reply to make.

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