Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/15

 OKNITHOLOGY proper place nearly every bird he was likely to meet with, liay s interest in ornithology continued, and in 1694 he completed a Synopsis Metkodica Avium, which, through the fault of the booksellers to whom it was entrusted, was not published till 1713, when Derham gave it to the world. 1 Linnaeus. Two years after Hay s death, LINN.^US, the great reformer of Natural History, was born, and in 1735 ap peared the first edition of the celebrated Systema Naturx. Successive editions of this work were produced under its author s supervision in 1740, 1748, 1758, and 17G6. Impressed by the belief that verbosity was the bane of science, he carried terseness to an extreme which frequently created obscurity, and this in no branch of zoology more than in that which relates to Birds. Still the practice introduced by him of assigning to each species a diagnosis by which it ought in theory to be distinguishable from any other known species, and of naming it by two words the first being the generic and the second the specific term, was so manifest an improvement upon any thing which had previously obtained that the Linnsean method of differ entiation and nomenclature established itself before long in spite of all opposition, and in principle became almost universally adopted. The opposition came of course from those who were habituated to the older state of things, and saw no evil in the cumbrous, half-descriptive half- designative titles which had to be employed whenever a species was to be spoken of or written about. The supporters of the new method were the rising generation of naturalists, many of whose names have since become famous, but among them were sonic whose admiration of their chief carried them to a pitch of enthusiasm which now seems absurd. Careful as Linnaeus was in drawing up his definitions of groups, it was immediately seen that they occasionally were made to comprehend creatures whose characteristics contradicted the prescribed diagnosis. His chief glory lies in his having reduced, at least for a time, a chaos into order, and in his shewing both by precept and practice that a name was not a definition. In his classifica tion of Birds he for the most part followed Ray, and where he departed from his model he seldom improved upon it. Ban-ore. ]n 1745 BARRERE brought out at Perpignan a little book called Ornithologist, Specimen nouum, and in 1752 Mb hring. MoiiRiXG published at Aurich one still smaller, his Avium Genera. Both these works (now rare) are manifestly framed on the Linna3an method, so far as it had then reached; but in their arrangement of the various forms of Birds they differed greatly from that which they designed to supplant, and they deservedly obtained little success. Yet as systematists their authors were no worse than Klein. KLEIN, whose Historic Avium Prodromus, appearing at Liibeck in 1750, and Stemmata Avium at Leipzig in 1759, met with considerable favour in some quarters. The chief merit of the latter work lies in its forty plates, whereon the heads and feet of many Birds are indifferently figured. 2 But, while the successive editions of Linnaeus s great work were revolutionizing Natural History, and his example of precision in language producing excellent effect on scientific writers, several other authors were advancing the study of Ornithology in a very different way a way that pleased the eye even more than his labours were pleasing the mind. Catesby. Between 1731 and 1743 MARK CATESBY brought out in 1 To this was added a supplement l&amp;gt;y PETIVER on the Bird of Madras, taken from pictures and information sent him by one Edward Buckley of Fort St George, being the first attempt to catalogue the Birds of any part of the British possessions in India. - After Klein s death his Prodromus, written in Latin, had the unwonted fortune of two distinct translations into German, published in the same year 1760, the one at Leipzig and Liibeck by BEHN, the other at Danzig by REYG:;R each of whom added more or less to tho ori inal. London his Natural History of Carolina two large folios containing highly-coloured plates of the Birds of that colony, Florida, and the Bahamas^ the forerunners of those numerous costly tomes which will have to be men tioned presently at greater length. 3 ELEAZAR ALBIX between 1738 and 1740 produced a Natural History of Eirds in three volumes of more modest dimensions, seeing that it is in quarto ; but he seems to have been ignorant of Ornithology, and his coloured plates are greatly inferior to Catesby s. Far better both as draughtsman and as authority was GEORGE EDWARDS, who in 1743 began, Edw under the same title as Albin, a series of plates with letter press, which was continued by the name of Gleanings in Natural History, and finished in 1760, when it had reached seven parts, forming four quarto volumes, the figures of which are nearly always quoted with approval. 4 The year which saw the works of Edwards completed was still further distinguished by the appearance in France, where little had been done since Belun s days, 5 in six quarto volumes, of the Ornitholoyie of MATHURIN JACQUES BRISSON a work of very great merit so far as it goes, for Bri.si as a descriptive ornithologist the author stands even now unsurpassed ; but it must be said that his knowledge, according to internal evidence, was confined to books and to the external parts of Birds skins. It was enough for him to give a scrupulously exact description of such specimens as came under his eye, distinguishing these by prefixing two asterisks to their name, using a single asterisk where he had only seen a part of the Bird, and leaving unmarked those that he described from other authors. He also added information as to the Museum (generally Reaumur s, of which he had been in charge) containing the specimen he described, acting on a principle which would have been advantageously adopted by many of his contemporaries and successors. His attempt at classifica tion was certainly better than that of Linnaeus ; and it is rather curious that the researches of the latest ornitho logists point to results in some degree comparable. with Brisson s systematic arrangement, for they refuse to keep the Birds-of-Prey at the head of the Class Aves, and they require the establishment of a much larger number of
 * Orders &quot; than for a long while has been thought advisable.

Of such &quot; Orders &quot; Brisson had twenty-six, and he gave Pigeons and Poultry precedence of the Birds which are plunderers and scavengers. But greater value lies in his generic or sub-generic divisions, which, taken as a whole, are far more natural than those of Linnaeus, and consequently capable of better diagnosis. More than this, he seems to be the earliest ornithologist, perhaps the earliest zoologist, to conceive the idea of each genus possessing what is now called a &quot; type &quot; though such a term does not occur in his work ; and, in like manner, without declaring it in so many words, he indicated unmistakably the existence of subgenera all this being effected by the skilful use of names. Unfor tunately he was too soon in the field to avail himself, even had he been so minded, of the convenient mode of nomencla ture brought into use by Linnaeus. Immediately on the completion of his Rtyne Animale in 1756, Brisson set about his Omithologie, and it is only in the last two volumes of the latter that any reference is made to the tenth edition of the Systema Naturae, in which the binomial method 3 Several Birds from Jamaica (1705-1725), and a good many of SEBA (1734-1765)&quot; but from little effect upon Ornithology. 4 The works of Catesby and at Nuremberg and Amsterdam Gorman, French, and Dutch. 5 Birds were treated of in a Dictionnaire raisonne et univei 1759. were figured in SLOANE S Voyage, &c. exotic species in the Thesaurus, &c., their faulty execution these plates had Edwards were afterwards reproduced by SKLIGMANN, with the letterpress in worthless fashion by one D. B. in a sel des animaux, published at Paris in