PREFACE

THIS DICTIONARY has taken me far longer to complete than, when I began it, I had any notion that it would. Yet I do not regret the delay, since it has enabled me, though very briefly, to shew (INTRODUCTION, page 108, note) that the latest investigation has proved the newly-announced group STEREORNITHES, which seemed at first so important, to have no more claim to recognition than had that known as ODONTORNITHES.

The articles by Dr. GADOW have fully sustained the expectation of them expressed in my initial NOTE. Read with the aid of the cross-references they contain and the INDEX that follows, they cannot fail to place the enquirer, be he beginner or advanced student, in a position he could not hope to occupy through the study of any other English book, and, what is better, a position whence he may extend his researches in many directions.

It has been my object throughout to compress into the smallest compass the information intended to be conveyed. It would have been easier to double the bulk of the work, but the limits of a single volume are already strained, and to extend it to a second would in several ways destroy such usefulness as it may possess. Still I cannot but regret having to omit any special notice of several interesting subjects which bear more or less directly upon Ornithology. To name only a few of them-Insulation, Isomorphism, Reversion and the