Moreover, though Birds make a not unimportant appearance in the earliest written records of the human race, the painter’s brush has preserved their counterfeit presentment for a still longer period. What is asserted—and that, so far as the writer is aware, without contradiction—by Egyptologists of the highest repute to be the oldest picture in the world is a fragmentary fresco taken from a tomb at Maydoom, and happily deposited, though in a decaying condition, in the Museum at Boolak. This picture is said to date from the time of the third or fourth dynasty, some three thousand years before the Christian era. In it are depicted with a marvellous fidelity, and thorough appreciation of form and colouring (despite a certain conventional treatment), the figures of six Geese. Four of these figures can be unhesitatingly referred to two species (Anser albifrons and A. ruficollis) well known at the present day; and if the two remaining figures, belonging to a third species, were re-examined by an expert they would very possibly be capable of determination with no less certainty. In later ages the representations of Birds of one sort or another in Egyptian paintings and sculptures become countless, and the bassi-rilievi of Assyrian monuments, though mostly belonging of course to a subsequent period, are not without them. No figures of Birds, however, seem yet to have been found on the incised stones, bones, or ivories of the prehistoric races of Europe.

It is of course necessary to name Aristotle (born b.c. 385, died b.c. 322) as the first serious author on Ornithology with whose writings we are acquainted, but even he had, as he tells us, predecessors; and, looking to that portion of his works on animals which has come down to us, one finds that, though more than 170 sorts of Birds are mentioned, yet what is said of them amounts on the whole to very little, and this consists more of desultory observations in illustration of his general remarks (which are to a considerable extent physiological or bearing on the subject of reproduction) than of an attempt at a connected account of Birds. Some of these observations are so meagre as to have given plenty of occupation to his many commentators, who with varying success have for more than three hundred years been endeavouring to determine what were the Birds of which he wrote; and the admittedly corrupt state of the text adds to their difficulties. One of the most recent of these commentators, the late Prof. Sundevall—equally proficient in classical as in ornithological knowledge—was, in 1863, compelled to leave more than a score of the Birds unrecognized. Yet it is not to be supposed that in what survives of the great philosopher’s writings we have more than a fragment of the knowledge possessed by him, though the hope of recovering his Ζωικά or his ’Ανατομικά, in which he seems to have given fuller descriptions of the animals he knew, can be hardly now entertained. A Latin translation by Gaza of Aristotle’s existing zoological work was printed at Venice in 1503. Another version, by Scaliger, was subsequently published. Two wretched English translations have appeared.

Next in order of date, though at a long interval, comes Gaius Plinius Secundus, commonly known as Pliny the Elder, who died a.d. 79, author of a general and very discursive Historia Naturalis in thirty-seven books, of which Book X. is devoted to Birds. A considerable portion of Pliny’s work may be traced to his great predecessor, of whose information he freely and avowedly availed himself, while the additions thereto made cannot be said to be, on the whole, improvements. Neither of these authors attempted to classify the Birds known to them beyond a very rough and for the most part obvious grouping. Aristotle seems to recognize eight principal groups :—(1) Gampsonyches, approximately equivalent to the Accipitres of Linnaeus; (2) Scolecophaga, containing most of what would now be called Oscines, excepting indeed the (3) Acanthophaga, composed of the Goldfinch, Siskin, and a few others; (4) Scnipophaga, the Woodpeckers; (5) Peristeroide, or Pigeons; (6) Schizopoda, (7) Steganopoda, and (8) Barea, nearly the same respectively as the Linnaean Grallae, Anseres, and Gallinae. Pliny, relying wholly on characters taken from the feet, limits himself to three groups—without assigning names to them—those which have “hooked talions, as Hawkes; or round long clawes, as Hennes ; or else they be broad, flat, and whole-footed, as Geese and all the sort in manner of water-foule ”—to use the words of Philemon Holland, who, in 1601, published a quaint and, though condensed, yet fairly faithful English translation of Pliny’s work.

About a century later came Aelian, who died about a.d. 140, and compiled in Greek (though he was an Italian by birth) a number of miscellaneous observations on the peculiarities of animals. His work is a kind of commonplace book kept without scientific discrimination. A considerable number of Birds are mentioned, and something said of almost each of them; but that something is too often nonsense—according to modern ideas—though occasionally a fact of interest may therein be found. It contains numerous references to former or contemporary writers whose works have perished, but there is nothing to shew that they were wiser than Aelian himself.

The twenty-six books De Animalibus of Albertus Magnus (Groot), who died a.d. 1282, were printed in 1478; but were apparently already well known from manuscript copies. They are founded on the works of Aristotle, many of whose statements are almost literally repeated, and often without acknowledgment. Occasionally Avicenna, or some other less-known author, is quoted; but it is hardly too much to say that the additional information is almost worthless. The twenty-third of these books is De Avibus, and therein a great number of Birds’ names make their earliest appearance, few of which are without interest from a philologist’s if not an ornithologist’s point of view, but there is much difficulty in recognizing the species to which many of them belong. In 1485 was printed the first dated copy of the volume known as the Ortus Sanitatis, to the popularity of which many editions testify. Though said by its author, Johann Wonnecke von Caub (Latinized as Johannes de Cuba), to have been composed from a study of the collections formed by a certain nobleman who had travelled in Eastern Europe, Western Asia, and Egypt—possibly Breidenbach, an account of whose travels in the Levant was printed at Mentz in 1486—it is really a medical treatise, and its zoological portion is mainly an abbreviation of the writings of Albertus Magnus, with a few interpolations from Isidorus of Seville (who flourished in the beginning of the seventh century, and was the author of many works highly esteemed in the Middle Ages) and a work known as Physiologus (q.v.). The third tractatus of this volume deals with Birds—including among them Bats, Bees, and other flying creatures; but as it is the first printed book in which figures of Birds are introduced it merits notice, though most of the illustrations, which are rude woodcuts, fail, even in the coloured copies, to give any precise indication of the species intended to be represented. The scientific degeneracy of this work is manifested as much by its title (Ortus for Hortus) as by the mode in which the several subjects are treated; but the revival of learning was at hand, and William Turner, a Northumbrian, while residing abroad to avoid persecution at home, printed at Cologne in 1544 the first commentary on the Birds mentioned by Aristotle and Pliny conceived in anything like the spirit that moves modern naturalists. In the same year and from the same press was issued a Dialogus de Avibus by Gybertus Longolius, and in 1570 Caius brought out in London his treatise De rariorum animalium atque stirpium historia. In this last work, small though it be, ornithology has a good share; and all three may still be consulted with interest and advantage by its votaries. Meanwhile the study received a great impulse from the appearance, at Zurich in 1555, of the third book of the illustrious Conrad Gesner’s Historia Animalium “qvi est de Auium natura,” and at Paris in the same year of Pierre Belon’s (Bellonius) Histoire de la nature des Oyseaux. Gesner brought an amount of erudition, hitherto unequalled, to bear upon his subject; and, making due allowance for the times in which he wrote, his judgment must in most respects be deemed excellent. In his work, however, there is little that can be called systematic treatment. Like nearly all his predecessors since Aelian, he adopted an alphabetical arrangement, though this was not too pedantically preserved, and did not hinder him from placing together the kinds of Birds which he supposed (and generally supposed rightly) to have the most resemblance to that one whose name, being best known, was chosen for the headpiece (as it were) of his particular theme, thus recognizing to some extent the principle of classification. Belon, with perhaps less book-learning than his contemporary, was evidently no mean scholar, and undoubtedly had more practical knowledge of Birds—their internal as well as external structure. Hence his work, written in French, contains a far greater amount of original matter; and his personal observations made in many countries, from England to Egypt, enabled him to avoid most of the puerilities which disfigure other works of his own or of a preceding age. Besides this, Belon disposed the Birds known to him according to a definite system, which (rude as we now know it to be) formed a foundation on which several of his successors were content to build, and even to this day traces of its influence may still be discerned in the arrangement followed by writers who have faintly appreciated the principles on which modern taxonomers rest the outline of their schemes. Both his work and that of Gesner were illustrated with woodcuts, many of which display much spirit and regard to accuracy.

Belon, as has just been said, had a knowledge of the anatomy of Birds, and he seems to have been the first to institute a direct comparison of their skeleton with that of Man; but in this respect he only anticipated by a few years the more precise researches of Volcher Coiter, a Frisian, who in 1573 and 1575 published at Nuremberg two treatises, in one of which the internal structure of Birds in general is very creditably described, while in the other the osteology and myology of certain forms is given in considerable detail, and illustrated by carefully-drawn figures. The first is entitled Externarum et internarum principalium humani corporis Tabulas, &c., while the second, which is the most valuable, is merely appended to the Lectiones Gabrielis Fallopii de partibus similaribus humani corporis, &c., and thus, the scope of each work being regarded as medical, the author’s labours were wholly overlooked by the mere natural-historians who followed, though Coiter introduced a table, “De differentiis Auium,” furnishing a key to a rough classification of such Birds as were known to him, and this as nearly the first attempt of the kind deserves notice here.

Contemporary with these three men was Ulysses Aldrovandus, a Bolognese, who wrote an Historia Naturalium in sixteen folio volumes, most of which were not printed till after his death in 1605; but those on Birds appeared between 1599 and 1603. The work is almost wholly a compilation, and that not of the most discriminative kind, while a peculiar jealousy of Gesner is continuously displayed, though his statements are very constantly quoted—nearly always as those of “Ornithologue,” his name appearing but few times in the text, and not at all in the list of authors cited. With certain modifications in principle not very important, but characterized by much more elaborate detail, Aldrovandus adopted Belon’s method of arrangement, but in a few respects there is a manifest retrogression. The work of Aldrovandus was illustrated by copper-plates, but none of his figures approach those of his immediate predecessors in character or accuracy. Nevertheless the book was eagerly sought, and several editions of it appeared.

Mention must be made of a medical treatise by Caspar Schwenckfeld, published at Liegnitz in 1603, under the title of Theriotropheum Silesiae, the fourth book of which consists of an “Aviarium Silesiae,” and is the earliest of the works we now know by the name of Fauna. The author was well acquainted with the labours of his predecessors, as his list of over one hundred of them testifies. Most of the Birds he describes are characterized with accuracy sufficient to enable them to be identified, and his observations upon them have still some interest; but he was innocent of any methodical system, and was not exempt from most of the professional fallacies of his time.

Hitherto, from the nature of the case, the works aforesaid treated of scarcely any but the Birds belonging to the orbis veteribus notus ; but the geographical discoveries of the sixteenth century began to bear fruit, and many animals of kinds unsuspected were, about one hundred years later, made known. Here there is only space to name Bontius, Clusius, Hernandez (or Fernandez), Marcgrave, Nieremberg, and Pιso, whose several works describing the natural products of both the Indies—whether the result of their own observation or compilation—together with those of Olina and Worm, produced a marked effect, since they led up to what may be deemed the foundation of scientific Ornithology.

This foundation was laid by the joint labours of Francis Willughby (born 1635, died 1672) and John Ray (born 1628, died 1705), for it is 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 Omithologia 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 lie 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.

Two years after Ray’s death, Linnaeus, the great reformer of Natural History, was born, and in 1735 appeared the first 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 any thing 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. 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 some 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 classification of Birds he for the most part followed Ray, and where he departed from his model he seldom improved upon it.

In 1745 Barrere brought out at Perpignan a little book called Ornithologiae Specimen nouum, and in 1752 Mohring 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 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.

But, while the successive editions of...