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own collection or the Imperial vivarium at Vienna—was at the pains to print at Pavia in his miscellaneous Deliciae Florae et Faunae Insubricae a Specimen Zoologicum^[1] containing diagnoses, duly named, of the birds discovered and described by Sonnerat in his Sonnerat. Voyage aux Indes orientales and Voyage à la Nouvelle Guinée, severally published at Paris in 1772 and 1776. But the most striking example of compilation was that exhibited by J. F. Gmelin, who in 1788 commenced what he called the Gmelin. Thirteenth Edition of the celebrated Systema Naturae, which obtained so wide a circulation that, in the comparative rarity of the original, the additions of this editor have been very frequently quoted, even by expert naturalists, as though they were the work of the author himself. Gmelin availed himself of every publication he could, but he perhaps found his richest booty in the labours of Latham, neatly condensing his English descriptions into Latin diagnoses, and bestowing on them binomial names. Hence it is that Gmelin appears as the authority for so much of the nomenclature now in use. He took many liberties with the details of Linnaeus's work, but left the classification, at least of the birds, as it was—a few new genera excepted.^[2]

During all this time little had been done in studying the internal structure of birds;^[3] but the foundations of the science of embryology had been laid by the investigations into the development of the chick by the great Harvey. Between 1666 and 1669 Perrault edited at Paris eight accounts of the dissection by du Verney of as many species of birds, which, translated into English, were published by the Royal Society in 1702, under the title of The Natural History of Animals. After the death of the two anatomists just named, another series of similar descriptions of eight other species was found among their papers, and the whole were published in the Mémoires of the French Academy of Sciences in 1733 and 1734. But in 1681 Gerard Blasius had brought out at Amsterdam an Anatome Animalium, containing the results of all the dissections of animals that he could find; and the second part of this book, treating of Volatilia, makes a respectable show of more than one hundred and twenty closely-printed quarto pages, though nearly two-thirds is devoted to a treatise De Ovo et Pullo, containing among other things a reprint of Harvey's researches, and the scientific rank of the whole book may be interred from bats being still classed with birds. In 1720 Valentini published, at Frankfort-on-the-Main, his Amphitheatrum Zootomicum, in which again most of the existing accounts of the anatomy of birds were reprinted. But these and many other contributions,^[4] made until nearly the close of the 18th century, though highly meritorious, were unconnected as a whole, and it is plain that no conception of what it was in the power of Comparative Anatomy to set forth had occurred to the most diligent dissectors.

It was reserved for Georges Cuvier, who in 1798 published at Paris his Tableau élémentaire de l'histoire naturelle des Cuvier. animaux, to lay the foundation of a thoroughly and hitherto unknown mode of appreciating the value of the various groups of the animal kingdom. Yet his first attempt was a mere sketch.^[5] Though he made a perceptible advance on the classification of Linnaeus, at that time predominant, it is now easy to see in how many ways—want of sufficient material being no doubt one of the chief—Cuvier failed to produce a really natural arrangement. His principles, however, are those which must still guide taxonomers, notwithstanding that they have in so great a degree overthrown the entire scheme which he propounded. Confining our attention here to ornithology, Cuvier's arrangement of the class Aves is now seen to be not very much better than any which it superseded. But this view is gained by following the methods which Cuvier taught. In the work just mentioned few details are given; but even the more elaborate classification of birds contained in his Leçons d'anatomie comparée of 1805 is based wholly on external characters, such as had been used by nearly all his predecessors; and the Règne Animal of 1817, when he was in his fullest vigour, afforded not the least evidence that he had ever dissected a couple even of birds^[6] with the object of determining their relative position in his system, which then, as before, depended wholly on the configuration of bills, wings and feet. But, though apparently without such a knowledge of the anatomy of birds as would enable him to apply it to the formation of that natural system which he was fully aware had yet to be sought, he seems to have been an excellent judge of the characters afforded by the bill and limbs, and the use he made of them, coupled with the extraordinary reputation he acquired on other grounds, procured for his system the adhesion for many years of the majority of ornithologists.^[7]

Hitherto mention has chiefly been made of works on general ornithology, but it will be understood that these were largely aided by the enterprise of travellers, and as there were many of them who published their narratives in separate forms their contributions have to be considered. Of those travellers then the first to be here especially named is Marsigli, the fifth volume of whose Danubius Pannonico-Mysicus is devoted to the birds he met with in the valley of the Danube, and appeared at the Hague in 1725, followed by a French translation in 1744.^[8] Most of the many pupils whom Linnaeus sent to foreign countries submitted their discoveries to him, but Kalm, Hasselqvist and Osbeck published separately their respective travels in North America, the Levant and China.^[9] The incessant journeys of Pallas and his colleagues—Falk, Georgi, S. G. Gmelin, Güldenstädt, Lepechin and others—in the exploration of the recently extended Russian empire supplied not only much material to the Commentarii and Acta of the Academy of St Petersburg, but more that is to be found in their narratives—all of it being of the highest interest to students of Palaearctic or Nearctic ornithology. Nearly the whole of their results, it may here be said, were summed up in the important Zoographia Rosso-Asiatica of the first-named naturalist, which saw the light in 1811—the year of its author's death—but, owing to circumstances over which he had no control, was not generally accessible till twenty years later. Of still wider interest are the accounts of Cook's three famous voyages, though unhappily much of the information gained by the naturalists who accompanied him on one or more of them seems to be irretrievably lost; the original observations of the elder Forster were not printed till 1844, and the valuable collection of zoological drawings made by the younger Forster still remains unpublished in the British Museum. The several accounts by John White, Collins, Phillips, Hunter and others of the colonization of New South Wales at the end of the last century ought not to be overlooked by any Australian ornithologist. The only information at this period on the ornithology of South America is contained in the two works on Chile by Molina, published at Bologna in 1776 and 1782. The travels of Le Vaillant in South Africa having been completed in 1785, his great Oiseaux d'Afrique began to appear in Paris in 1797; but it is hard to speak properly of this work, for several of the species described in it are certainly not, and never were in his time, inhabitants of that country, though he sometimes gives a long account of the circumstances under which he observed them.^[10]

From travellers who employ themselves in collecting the animals of any distant country the zoologists who stay at home and study those of their own district, be it great or small, are really not so much divided as at first might appear. Both may well be named “Faunists,” and of the latter there were not a few who having turned their attention more or less to ornithology should here be

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1. This was reprinted in 1882 by the Willughby Society.
2. Daudin's unfinished Traité élémentaire et complet d'ornithologie appeared at Paris in 1800, and therefore is the last of these general works published in the 18th century.
3. A succinct notice of the older works on ornithotomy is given by Professor Selenka in the introduction to that portion of Dr Bronn's Klassen und Ordnungen des Thierreichs relating to birds (pp. 1-9) published in 1869; and Professor Carus's Geschichte der Zoologie, published in 1872, may also be usefully consulted for further information on this and other heads.
4. The treatises of the two Bartholinis and Borrichius published at Copenhagen deserve mention if only to record the activity of Danish anatomists in those days.
5. It had no effect on Lacépède, who in the following year added a Tableau méthodique containing a classification of birds to his Discours d'overture (Mém. de l'lnstitut, iii. pp. 454-468, 503-519).
6. So little regard did he pay to the osteology of birds that, according to de Blainville (Jour. de Physique, xcii. p. 187, note), the skeleton of a fowl to which was attached the head of a hornbill was for a long time exhibited in the Museum of Comparative Anatomy at Paris! Yet, in order to determine the difference of structure in their organs of voice, Cuvier, as he says in his Leçons (iv. 464), dissected more than one hundred and fifty species of birds. Unfortunately for him, as will appear in the sequel, it seems not to have occurred to him to use any of the results he obtained as the basis of a classification.
7. It is unnecessary to enumerate the various editions of the Règne Animal. Of the English translations, that edited by Griffiths and Pidgeon is the most complete. The ornithological portion of it contained in these volumes received many additions from John Edward Gray, and appeared in 1829.
8. Though much later in date, the Iter per Poseganam Sclavoniae of Piller and Mittercacher, published at Buda in 1783, may perhaps be here most conveniently mentioned.
9. The results of Forskål's travels in the Levant, published after his death by Niebuhr, require mention, but the ornithology they contain is but scant.
10. It has been charitably suggested that, his collection and notes having suffered shipwreck, he was induced to supply the latter from his memory and the former by the nearest approach to his lost specimens that he could obtain. This explanation, poor as it is, fails, however, in regard to some species.