familiar, and these are either wanting in expression or are caricatures;[1]
but those that were drawn from live birds, or represent species
which he knew in life, are worthy of all praise. It is well known
that the earlier editions of this work, especially if they be upon
large paper, command extravagant prices; but in reality the
copies on smaller paper are now the rarer, for the stock of them has
been consumed in nurseries and schoolrooms, where they have
been torn up or worn out with incessant use. Moreover, whatever
the lovers of the fine arts may say, it is nearly certain that the
“Bewick Collector” is mistaken in attaching so high a value to
these old editions, for owing to the want of skill in
printing—indifferent ink being especially assigned as one cause—many of the
earlier issues fail to show the most delicate touches of the engraver,
which the increased care bestowed upon the edition of 1847 (published
under the supervision of John Hancock) has revealed—though it
must be admitted that certain blocks have suffered from wear of
the press so as to be incapable of any more producing the effect
intended. Of the text it may be said that it is respectable, but no
more.
The existence of these two works explains the widely-spread taste for ornithology in England, which is to foreigners so puzzling, and the zeal—not always according to knowledge, but occasionally reaching to serious study—with which that taste is pursued.
Ornithology in the 19th Century.
On reviewing the progress of ornithology since the end of the 18th century, the first thing that will strike us is the fact that general works, though still undertaken, have become proportionally fewer, while special works, whether relating to the ornithic portion of the fauna of any particular country, or limited to certain groups of birds—works to which the name of “Monograph” has become wholly restricted—have become far more numerous. Another change has come over the condition of ornithology, as of kindred sciences, induced by the multiplication of learned societies which issue publications as well as of periodicals of greater or less scientific pretension. A number of these must necessarily be left unnoticed here. Still it seems advisable to furnish some connected account of the progress made in the ornithological knowledge of the British Islands and those parts of the European continent which lie nearest to them or are most commonly sought by travellers, the Dominion of Canada and the United States of America, South Africa, India, together with Australia and New Zealand. The more important monographs will usually be found cited in the separate articles on birds contained in this work, though some, by reason of changed views of classification, have for practical purposes to be regarded now as general works.
It will perhaps be most convenient to begin by mentioning some of these last, and in particular a number of them which appeared at Le Vaillant. Paris very early in the 19th century. First in order of them is the Histoire naturelle d'une partie d'oiseaux nouveaux et rares de l'Amérique et des Indes, a folio volume[2] published in 1801 by Le Vaillant. This is devoted to the very distinct and not nearly-allied groups of horn bills and of birds which for want of a better name we must call “Chatterers,” and is illustrated, like those works of which a notice immediately follows, by coloured plates, done in what was then considered to be the highest style of art and by the best draughtsmen procurable. The first volume of a Histoire naturelle des perroquets, a companion work by the same author, appeared in the same year, and is truly a monograph, since the parrots constitute a family of birds so naturally severed from all others that there has rarely been anything else confounded with them. The second volume came out in 1805, and a third was issued in 1837-1838 long after the death of its predecessor's author, by Bourjot St-Hilaire. Between 1803 and 1806 Le Vaillant also published in just the same style two volumes with the title of Histoire naturelle des oiseaux de Paradis et des rolliers, suivie de celle des toucans et des barbus, an assemblage of forms, which, miscellaneous as it is, was surpassed in incongruity by a fourth work on the same scale, the Histoire naturelle des promerops et des guêpiers, des couroucous et des touracos, for herein are found jays, waxwings, the cock-of-the-rock (Rupicola), and what not besides. The plates in this last are by Barraband, for many years regarded as the perfection of ornithological artists, and indeed the figures, when they happen to have been drawn from the life, are not bad; but his skill was quite unable to vivify the preserved specimens contained in museums, and when he had only these as subjects he simply copied the distortions of the “bird-stuffer.” The following year, 1808, being aided by Temminck of Amsterdam, of whose son we shall presently hear more, Le Vaillant brought out the sixth volume of his Oiseaux d'Afrique, already mentioned. Four more volumes of this work were promised; but the means of executing them were denied to him, and, though he lived until 1824, his publications ceased.
A similar series of works was projected and begun about the same time as that of Le Vaillant by Audebert and Vieillot, though Audebert and Vieillot. the former, who was by profession a painter and illustrated the work, was already dead more than a year before the appearance of the two volumes, bearing date 1802, and entitled Oiseaux dorés ou à reflets metalliques, the effect of the plates in which he sought to heighten by the lavish use of gilding. The first volume contains the “Colibris, Oiseaux-mouches, Jacamars et Promerops,” the second the “Grimpereaux” and “Oiseaux de Paradis”—associations which set all the laws of systematic method at defiance. His colleague, Vieillot, brought out in 1805 a Histoire naturelle des plus beaux chanteurs de la Zone Torride with figures by Langlois of tropical finches, grosbeaks, buntings and other hard-billed birds; and in 1807 two volumes of a Histoire naturelle des oiseaux de l'Amérique septentrionale, without, however, paying much attention to the limits commonly assigned by geographers to that part of the world. In 1805 Anselme Desmarest Desmarest. published a Histoire naturelle des tangaras, des manakins et des todiers, which, though belonging to the same category as all the former, differs from them in its more scientific treatment of the subjects to which it refers; and, in 1808, K. J. Temminck. Temminck, whose father's aid to Le Vaillant has already been noticed, brought out at Paris a Histoire naturelle des pigeons illustrated by Madame Knip, who had drawn the plates for Desmarest's volume.[3]
Since we have begun by considering these large illustrated works in which the text is made subservient to the coloured plates, it may be convenient to continue our notice of such others of similar character as it may be expedient to mention here, though thereby we shall be led somewhat far afield. Most of them are but luxuries, and there is some degree of truth in the remark of Andreas Wagner in his Report on the Progress of Zoology for 1843, drawn up for the Ray Society (p. 60), that they “are not adapted for the extension and promotion of science, but must inevitably, on account of their unnecessary costliness, constantly tend to reduce the number of naturalists who are able to avail themselves of them, and they thus enrich ornithology only to its ultimate injury.” Earliest in date Audubon. as it is greatest in bulk stands Audubon's Birds of America in four volumes, containing four hundred and thirty-five plates, of which the first part appeared in London in 1827 and the last in 1838. It does not seem to have been the author's original intention to publish any letterpress to this enormous work, but to let the plates tell their own story, though finally, with the assistance, as is now known, of William Macgillivray, a text, on the Macgillivray. whole more than respectable, was produced in five large octavos under the title of Ornithological Biography, of which more will be said in the sequel. Audubon has been greatly extolled as an ornithological artist; but he was far too much addicted to representing his subjects in violent action and in postures that outrage nature, while his drawing is very frequently defective.[4] Elliot. In 1866 D. G. Elliot began, and in 1869 finished, a sequel to Audubon's great work in two volumes, on the same scale—The New and Hitherto unfigured Species of the Birds of North America, containing life-size figures of all those which had been added to its fauna since the completion of the former.
In 1830 John Edward Gray commenced the Illustrations of Gray and Hardwicke. Indian Zoology, a series of plates of vertebrated animals, but mostly of birds, from drawings, it is believed by native artists in the collection of General Hardwicke, whose name is therefore associated with the work. Scientific Lear. names are assigned to the species figured; but no text was ever supplied. In 1832 Edward Lear, afterwards well known as a humorist, brought out his Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, a volume which deserves especial notice from the extreme fidelity to nature and the great artistic skill with which the figures were executed.
This same year (1832) saw the beginning of the marvellous series of illustrated ornithological works by which the name of John Gould. Gould is likely to be always remembered. A Century of Birds from the Himalaya Mountains was followed by The
- ↑ This is especially observable in the figures of the birds of prey.
- ↑ There is also an issue of this, as of the same author's other works, on large quarto paper.
- ↑ Temminck subsequently reproduced, with many additions, the text of this volume in his Histoire naturelle des pigeons et des gallinacées, published at Amsterdam in 1813-1815, in 3 vols. 8vo. Between 1838 and 1848 M. Florent-Provost brought out at Paris a further set of illustrations of pigeons by Mme Knip.
- ↑ On the completion of these two works, for they must be regarded as distinct, an octavo edition in seven volumes under the title of The Birds of America was published in 1840-1844. In this the large plates were reduced by means of the camera lucida, the text was revised, and the whole systematically arranged. Other reprints have since been issued, but they are vastly inferior both in execution and value. A sequel to the octavo Birds of America, corresponding with it in form, was brought out in 1853-1855 by Cassin as Illustrations of the Birds of California, Texas, Oregon, British and Russian America.
