• AN ACHIEVEMENT IN ORNITHOLOGY.
AVERY remarkable announcement has been made in description of a book to be published shortly by Messrs. Hutchinson. The subject of the work is "Extinct Birds," and the author is Mr. Lionel Walter Rothschild, the Member of Parliament for the Aylesbury division of Bucking- hamshire, and, of course, well known as a naturalist and a student of zoology. If the epithet " unique " is often misused, it is in this connexion, according to the accounts of the book, appropriate enough. Not only has it oast an enormous sum to produce, but it could not have been produced at all without such antecedent conditions and opportunities of collecting material beforehand as are hardly likely to be repeated ; further, the book when published is to represent the highest achievements of paper-maker, printer, and bookbinder. Mr. Rothschild describes it as "an attempt to write in one volume a short account of those birds which have become extinct in historical times—that is, within the last six or seven hundred years; to which are added a few which are almost extinct, or which may be considered extinct." It is to be printed on "im- perishable" paper,—that is, the finest and most durable to be procured ; further, it is to contain a number of illustrations printed in colour, also on "imperishable" paper, -all item that suggests very large expense at once. Hitherto the diffi- culty has been to find a "surface" which will permit the best results from colour-printing, and which, nevertheless, will not in the long run destroy the paper. But a lavish outlay of money alone could not produce the kind of work which is described. Probably no living authority on ornithological matters could write exhaustively on the subject of birds which have become extinct in historical times, and certainly no satis- factory series of illustrations of eggs and skins and other specimens could be made, without frequent access to the wonderful Tring collections. Few books can have needed for their production so extreme a combination of talent, fortune, and the delight in research of the collector and man of science.
The publication of such a work suggests some con- siderations, one of which, perhaps as difficult as it is fasci- nating, is the tininess of the era comprised in the phrase "historical times," and the smallness of the number of birds which have become extinct in it, when compared with the whole number of known and half-known forms and species. Six or seven hundred years cannot, of course, be regarded as a small period in the history of the fauna of any individual country, or in the recorded history, even, of the fauna of tbe world. To take what are perhaps the two most widely known instances of birds recently become extinct, it is Hardly three hundred years since the dodo was knocked on the head by hungry British sailors, and the eggs of the great auk are still notable curiosities at London sales. Those are certainly two well-recognised disappearances among the larger members of the world's avifauna ; but bow many people could give offhand any other instances of recently extinct birds, or could point confidently to any broad changes in the habits or appearance of birds familiar to our great-grandfathers and ourselves ? True, it is demonstrably not much more than two thousand years ago that the swallow and the house-martin first built their nests on the walls or ledges of English houses. If swallows or house-martins came to England before the time of the Romans, they must have built their nests in hollow tree-trunks, or on ledges of cliffs, or upon
tree-boughs corresponding in position to the roof and cross-beams on which swallows build their nests in these days, or to the eaves under which martins place their little cups of clay. They could not have made use of the nesting-places provided by modern buildings, simply because there were no houses built. It is probable, again, that the marked tendency of starlings to prefer ripe fruit to any other form of diet is a modern and a growing habit; and it is possible that the rook may have changed from being a useful eater of grubs to being occasionally destructive in the chicken- yard. Sparrows, almost certainly, have become lazier in quest of natural food since the growing accumulation of human habitations, not only in the town, but in the country; and, finally, the acclimatisation of such wild and wary birds as wood-pigeons in the London parks, and in a less degree black-beaded gulls on the Thames, is an outstanding feature of the natural history of English birds in the last half- century. Those changes, however, are insignificant in com- parison to such a change as that under which France, for instance, has become a country whose bird-life approximates to that of our own latitudes, whereas it was only in the Miocene period that among the birds of French forests were trogons and parrots. That was many thousands of years ago ; but even then the French trogous and parrots were of the same structure, and probably nearly the same plumage, as the Hashing and brilliant-winged inhabitants of tropical America of to-day. How vastly greater a step of imagina- tion is required to picture the cretaceous era, so well illus- trated by recent excavations in Argentina, when every " bird " had teeth.
Even so, however, and granting that the mere comparison of the size of one subject with the possible size of another could never disturb an author of any worth from embarking on a cherished project, a work dealing only with a fringe of that most interesting problem, the disappearance of this or that living species, must be of considerable magnitude. There arises, possibly with a certain feeling of self-congratulation, another point, which is the naturalness of a great work of this kind being undertaken first by an Englishman. Of all nations, the English were the first to conceive it their duty to preserve in the greatest numbers compatible with human convenience the birds and beasts in which also they have taken, at all events in the past, a more human interest than others. There exist, no doubt, on the Continent societies concerned with the checking of the destruction of bird-life; but the annual destruction of small birds wantonly or for food leaves France, Italy, and Switzerland countries with almost empty woods and gardens. The numbers of the smaller migratory birds which perish in their passage north to the British Isles in the spring, and on their way south in the autumn, are incalculable, and their destruction might well be supposed to be likely to exterminate some of the less numerous species. In England, fortunately, there is a different state of affairs. There are still a number of people who conceive that the first thing to do with a rare bird is to shoot it, and it is still the fact that the breeding of many species is greatly interrupted by ruthless destruction of nests and eggs; there are still, also, thousands of Englishwomen who contribute to the slaughter of such birds as egrets and birds of paradise. But for all that, we have been sufficiently interested in the preservation of species to pass some very complete Wild Birds' Preservation Acts, and these, although they are not always strictly enforced, have on the whole tended to make the British Isles into, as it were, the " sanctuary " of the great "forest" of Europe. It was fitting that a work designed to be, and likely to become, monumental, dealing with the history of the extinction of certain species, should have been produced by a citizen of the nation which has done most to preserve all species in their proper surroundings. A last question, and one that can only be asked on rare occasions, arises. The completion of such a monumental work will probably leave a number of people asking : Was it worth while ? It has coat, it is said, twenty thousand pounds. Was it worth it? The scope of the book is limited, and though it may add a certain amount to human knowledge, and though the book itself can hardly fail to be the standard work on the subject, since the subject cannot again be treated in the same manner, still, was it worth so much money ? Twenty thousand pounds would build a church or a hospital, would found a professorship, would endow a College; could be used in surgical experiment, in the chemical laboratory, in bacteriological research; would feed a thousand starving men for a year. In reply to that it may perhaps be asked : How many poor men would not spend twenty thousand pounds if they were given it, in order to make a book which should be unquestionably the standard work on their own subject? There are many such men to-day. Be sure they are not wrong in desiring that money should be spent on an object on which money is spent so seldom, and in directions where the highest success is denied to individual effort simply for lack of mere cash. It is, after all, an inspiring thought for rich men that they can add to the substance of the world's permanent knowledge, as they certainly can add to the sum of its temporary physical well-being, by the right signing of cheques. And if it is still to be asked when the cheque is signed : By what standard can the cash value of any great book be measured ? the best answer is that future generations will acclaim the maker of the book, but will never ask first what was the cost 13f its production.
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