An Illustrated Manual of British Birds (Classic Reprint)

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 em croached upon owing to the length of an engraving, whereas exten sion 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 Cross bill, 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, Blackr throated and Desert W heatears, the Barred Warbler, wall-creeper.

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