Page:A list of the birds of Australia 1913.djvu/16

 This sentence is as ambiguous as the majority of the arguments presented by the Committee in their Preface. If by classification they mean the whole of the grouping, their statement is incorrect as the whole of the higher groups are those of Sharpe's Handlist of Birds, which was not based on Gould's classification nor has it anything to do with it. The British Museum Catalogues were independently produced, and the classification there utilized had nothing to do with that used by Gould. The Handlist was also a new production, the classification used in the Catalogue being rejected in toto, so that I can see no connexion whatever between the Checklist classification and that of Gould as regards the groups higher than genera.

If by classification the Committee intended to indicate the genus and species names accepted, their statement is still incorrect, as though they have in many cases used the Gouldian nomenclature, they cannot claim to have made use of the corrections made in the British Museum Catalogues. Regarding this latter view, however, the Committee definitely state that "as the generic and specific and subspecific names of John Gould as used in his work entitled 'The Birds of Australia' had been in current use in Australia for sixty years and upwards, the principle of priority should not be carried back beyond the respective dates contained in those works." I have shown that this statement is quite incorrect, as the currently-used names in Australia have not for the last forty years been those used by Gould but have been those made use of in the British Museum Catalogue of Birds, and that moreover Gould himself in his Handbook of the Birds of Australia rejected those of the Birds of Australia, writing in the Preface, p. vi: "Modern research having ascertained that many of the species believed at the time I wrote to be new had been previously described by Latham and others, the specific names assigned to them by those authors have, in obedience to the Law of Priority, been restored."

In the Introduction to his Nests and Eggs of Australian Birds published in 1901 (twelve years ago), A. J. Campbell (one of the members of the present Checklist Committee) wrote: "Regarding my work itself I have little to say except to mention that the scientific classification and nomenclature are in accordance generally with the 'Catalogue of Birds' of the British Museum; while the vernacular names with few exceptions may be found in the 'List of Vernacular