This foundation was laid by the joint labours of Francis Willughby (1635-1672) and John Ray (1628-1705), for it is Willughby and Ray. impossible to separate their share of work in natural history more than to say that, while the former more especially devoted himself to zoology, botany was the favourite pursuit of the latter. Together they studied, together they travelled and together they collected. Willughby, the younger of the two, and at first the other's pupil, seems to have gradually become the master; but, he dying before the promise of his life was fulfilled, his writings were given to the world by his friend Ray, who, adding to them from his own stores, published the Ornithologia in Latin in 1676, and in English with many emendations in 1678. In this work birds generally were grouped in two great divisions—“land-fowl” and “water-fowl”—the former being subdivided into those which have a crooked beak and talons, and those which have a straighter bill and claws, while the latter was separated into those which frequent waters and watery places, and those that swim in the water—each subdivision being further broken up into many sections, to the whole of which a key was given. Thus it became possible for almost any diligent reader without much chance of error to refer to its proper place nearly every bird he was likely to meet with. Ray's interest in ornithology continued, and in 1694 he completed a Synopsis Methodica 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]
Two years after Ray's death, Linnaeus, the great reformer of natural history, was born, and in 1735 appeared the first Linnaeus. edition of the celebrated Systema Naturae. Successive editions of this work were produced under its author's supervision in 1740, 1748, 1758 and 1766. 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 anything which had previously obtained that the Linnaean method of differentiation and nomenclature established itself before long in spite of all opposition, and in principle became almost universally adopted. In his classification of birds Linnaeus for the most part followed Ray, and where he departed from his model he seldom improved upon it.
In 1745 P. Barrère brought out at Perpignan a little book called Ornithologiae Specimen novum, and in 1752 Möhring published at Aurich one still smaller, his Avium Genera. Both these works (now rare) are manifestly framed on the Linnaean 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, whose Historiae Avium Prodromus, appearing at Lübeck in 1750, and Stemmata Avium at Leipzig in 1750, 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. Between 1731 and 1743 Mark Catesby brought out in London his Natural History of Carolina—two large folios containing highly coloured plates of the birds of that colony, Florida and the Bahamas.[3] Eleazar Albin between 1738 and 1740 produced a Natural History of Birds in three volumes of more modest dimensions; 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, under the same title as Albin, a series of plates with letterpress, which was continued by the name of Gleanings in Natural History, and finished in 1760, when it h;id 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 Brisson. been done since Belon's days,[5] in six quarto volumes, of the Ornithologie of Mathurin Jacques Brisson—a work of very great merit so far as it goes, for 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. His attempt at classification was certainly better than that of Linnaeus; and it is rather curious that the researches of the latest ornithologists 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” than for a long while was thought advisable. Of such “Orders” 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 “type”—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. Unfortunately he was too soon in the field to avail himself, even had he been so minded, of the convenient mode of nomenclature brought into use by Linnaeus. Immediately on the completion of his Règne Animale in 1756, Brisson set about his Ornithologie, 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 was introduced. It is certain that the first four volumes were written if not printed before that method was promulgated, and when the fame of Linnaeus as a zoologist rested on little more than the very meagre sixth edition of the Systema Naturae and the first edition of his Fauna Suecica. Brisson has been charged with jealousy of, if not hostility to, the great Swede, and it is true that in the preface to his Ornithologie he complains of the insufficiency of the Linnaean characters, but, when one considers how much better acquainted with birds the Frenchman was, such criticism must be allowed to be pardonable if not wholly just. Brisson's work was in French, with a parallel translation (edited, it is said, by Pallas) in Latin, which last was reprinted separately at Leiden three years afterwards.
- ↑ To this was added a supplement by Petiver on the Birds 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 Lübeck by Behn, the other at Danzig by Reyger—each of whom added more or less to the original.
- ↑ Several birds from Jamaica were figured in Sloane's Voyage, &c. (1705-1725), and a good many exotic species in the Thesaurus, &c.. of Seba (1734-1765), but from their faulty execution these plates had little effect upon Ornithology.
- ↑ The works of Catesby and Edwards were afterwards reproduced at Nuremberg and Amsterdam by Seligmann, with the letterpress in German, French and Dutch.
- ↑ Birds were treated of in a worthless fashion by one D. B. in a Dictionnaire raisonné et universal des animaux, published at Paris in 1759.
