A Manual Of The Birds Of Australia Vol 1

Author : Gregory M. Mathews
Publisher : Forgotten Books
ISBN 13 : 9781330393871
Total Pages : 363 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (938 download)

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Download or read book A Manual of the Birds of Australia, Vol. 1 written by Gregory M. Mathews and published by Forgotten Books. This book was released on 2015-06-25 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from A Manual of the Birds of Australia, Vol. 1: Orders Casuarii to Columbæ We have attempted to provide a handy reference to the known facts concerning Australian birds for the use of students, and to this end have given a complete primary synonymy, with reference to the coloured plates furnished in Gould's and Mathews's Birds of Australia, the standard works on the subject. The present work is entirely based upon Mathews's work, in which will be found complete accounts, as far as recorded, of the life-histories and economics, with full discussion of all nomenclatural problems, dissertations on the phylogeny of the groups and detailed synonymy. Any item not fully understood in the present essay will be found elaborately explained in that place. We have extracted the detailed descriptions of the plumages from the same work, but have supplemented them whenever opportunity has been afforded by the receipt of new material, and have made reference to literature recently published for additional matter. With regard to the description of nests and eggs we have purposely restricted these to the smallest items possible, as Australians have already two magnificent works on this subject, viz., those of Campbell and North. In his List of the Birds of Australia Mathews gave a resume of the workers on the subject, and, consequently, we have not referred to that item here. We have treated the Ornis under binomial headings, recording the subspecies differentiated in one item. This is somewhat different from general usage, but we believe it to be the most useful method of displaying subspecies, whether these be considered by the professional ornithologist or by the amateur field worker, and it is to this latter class we hope this book will appeal. We add a few notes under the headings Nomenclature, Classification and Zoogeographical Distribution, which should be of assistance to students. I. - Nomenclature. This subject has long been a controversial one through the absolute carelessness of "authoritative" writers, whose action has misled those ignorant of the facts into belief of accuracy, whereas superficiality was most obvious to the critic. Moreover, such workers, when easy opportunity was afforded, made much stir about the changing of a single name, conceiving ostrich-like to hide their omissions by the pillorying of such an instance. It is the pride of the present writers that the reduction of this subject to its present status of comparative insignificance is due to their exertions, and that succeeding workers will be able to deal with the scientific side of ornithology without much trouble from this factor. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.