Abstract
“YARRELL'S British Birds”is without doubt one of the best known and most widely appreciated books on Natural History ever published in this country, and has probably done more than any other work to excite and augment an interest in one of the most attractive branches of zoology. At the same time, “Yarrell's Birds” is neither cheap nor popular in the ordinary sense of these terms, and the fact of three large editions of it having been sold, and a fourth being now called for, is a sterling proof of its extraordinary merits. The third edition of the work was issued in 1856, a few months before the author's death. For the editorship of the present (fourth) edition the publisher has secured the services of Prof. Newton of Cambridge, than whom no one is better qualified for the undertaking. Moreover, what is of still greater consequence, it may be added that, so far as we can judge from the parts of the work that have as yet reached us, Prof. Newton has set about the task entrusted to him in a very thorough way. As has been observed in the prospectus of the new edition, the literature of the subject has been nearly doubled within these last thirty years—that is, since the date of the publication of Mr. Yarrell's original work, while even since the issue of the last edition an extraordinary augmentation has been made of our knowledge of British Birds. “Very many of the species respecting which little was actually known in 1856 have been traced by competent observers to their breeding-quarters, and their habits ascertained, and in some instances minutely recorded.” Mr. Yarrell's later editions having been little more than reprints of the original, with the intercalation of certain species recorded from time to time in the “Zoologist” and similar periodicals as “new British birds,” it follows that a good deal of alteration and addition was necessary to bring the work up to the present standard of ornithological knowledge. This the new editor has apparently determined to effect, in spite of the vast amount of labour involved in so doing, which, on the whole, will fall little short of that of preparing an entirely new woik on the subject. Such articles as those on the Griffon and Egyptian Vultures and the Greenland and Iceland Falcons in the first number require to be entirely rewritten, while material additions have to be made to the history of even the commonest species, particularly as regards their geographical range and their representation by allied forms.
A History of British Birds.
By the late William Yarrell Fourth Edition, revised by Alfred Newton, M.A., F.Z.S. Parts 1 and 2. (London: Van Voorst, 1871.)
Article PDF
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
S., P. A History of British Birds . Nature 4, 403 (1871). https://doi.org/10.1038/004403a0
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/004403a0