Volume 1

Key to North American birds : containing a concise account of every species of living and fossil bird at present known from the continent north of the Mexican and United States boundary, inclusive of Greenland and Lower California with which are incorporated General ornithology ... and Field ornithology ... / by Elliott Coues.

  • Coues, Elliott, 1842-1899.
Date:
1903
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Key to North American birds : containing a concise account of every species of living and fossil bird at present known from the continent north of the Mexican and United States boundary, inclusive of Greenland and Lower California with which are incorporated General ornithology ... and Field ornithology ... / by Elliott Coues. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    tatod by the attentions of Mr. Robert Ridgway, the Curator of Ornithology. And may that less tangible but not less real source of strength which inheres in the sympathetic and genial intercourse of a lifetime continue to be mine to draw upon, for all my works, from my warm friend, J. A. Allen, the first President of the American Ornithologists’ Union. “Prefaces,” says some one, “ever were and still are but of two sorts; . . . still the author keeps to his old and wonted method of prefacing, when, at the beginning of his book lie enters, either with a halter about his neck, submitting himself to his reader's mercy whether he shall be hanged, or no; or else in a huffing manner he appears with the halter in his hand, and threatens to hang his reader, if he gives him not his good word.” But I wish neither to hang nor be hanged; I wish the work were better than it is, for my reader’s sake ; I wish the author were better than he is, for my own sake ; and above all I wish that every author may rise superior to his best work, to the end that the man himself be judged above his largest achievements. It is well to do great things, but better still to be great. E. C. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C., April, 1884.