The Ready Guide To British Birds Classic Reprint PDF Download

Excerpt from An Illustrated Manual of British Birds The plan of a work in which exactly two pages are devoted to each species, may justly be called Procrustean; and, unfortunately for the author, the limited space at his disposal has often been encroached upon owing to the length of an engraving, whereas extension of the text has rarely been called for. Little idea, for instance, can be formed of the labour involved in an article like that on the Crossbill, wherein the necessary consideration of the distinctive features of several local races increased the difficulty of sketching briefly the history of a remarkable bird. In this and similar cases, when four lines in excess meant as many hours of hard work in condensing, the writer has sometimes been tempted - in the interest of his readers as well as in his own - to deviate from the original scheme; yet any such concession must necessarily have led to an increase in the bulk and the expense of the work. Even now, the low price is due to the fact that the publishers own the blocks from which the illustrations were struck for the four editions of Yarrell's 'British Birds'; though to these have been added wood-cuts of many recent wanderers to Great Britain, such as the Isabelline, Black-throated and Desert Wheatears, the Barred Warbler, Wall-Creeper, Needle-tailed Swift, Lesser Kestrel, Killdeer and Sociable Plovers, and Mediterranean Black-headed Gull; while fresh engravings have taken the place of the unsatisfactory originals of the Marsh-Harrier, Gos-Hawk, Merlin and Great Auk. Great liberality has also been shown by the publishers in placing no restriction on alterations whenever the slightest improvement was thereby attainable. For example, a scrap of information, obtained by mere chance, led to the re-writing of the article on the Blue-throat at the last moment, and that too for reasons which nine in ten of my readers might, perhaps, consider inadequate; the tenth, however, would appreciate the need for strict accuracy, and it is his intelligent approbation that I have striven to deserve. 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.