Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from A Popular Handbook of the Ornithology of the United States and Canada, Vol. 2: Based on Nuttall's Manual
A more natural disposition of the subject, than the classification I have now adopted, would have been per haps more gratifying to the learned, but less useful in practice, and more perplexing to the general reader. A numerical system, (binary, quinary, 8m.) however curi ous and philosophical, yet intricate in its ultimate rela tions, has the inconvenience at the outset of debarring the majority of students from the attempt to compre hend a subject so complicated and ambiguous and which at the best is but a bewildering and fanciful theory. A strict disposition into natural groups, would have been indispensable in a purely screntific treatise on Birds; but in a work of this nature, intended for the general Reader, we have given the preference to the more simple arrange ment of Temminck, which indeed differs little from the artificial classification of Linnaeus and Latham. The difficulty of recollecting, on all occasions, an intricate mass of real and fanciful affinities, renders such methods of distribution entirely nugatory in point of convenience.
To complete the Catalogue of our birds and those of the contiguous and vast possessions of Great Britain, I have added an appendix, drawn chie?y from the dis coveries recorded by Richardson and Swainson in the second volume of their Northern Zoology and to which is also added some information and additions from other sources, as well as the remedy of some inadvertent omissions.
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