A History of the Birds of Europe
A History of the Birds of Europe, Including all the Species Inhabiting the Western Palearctic Region is a nine-volume ornithological book published in parts between 1871 and 1896. It was mainly written by Henry Eeles Dresser, although Richard Bowdler Sharpe co-authored the earlier volumes. It describes all the bird species reliably recorded in the wild in Europe and adjacent geographical areas with similar fauna.
About A History of the Birds of Europe in brief
A History of the Birds of Europe, Including all the Species Inhabiting the Western Palearctic Region is a nine-volume ornithological book published in parts between 1871 and 1896. It was mainly written by Henry Eeles Dresser, although Richard Bowdler Sharpe co-authored the earlier volumes. It describes all the bird species reliably recorded in the wild in Europe and adjacent geographical areas with similar fauna. It also gives their worldwide distribution, variations in appearance and migratory movements. The commercial success of the Ornithology is unknown, but it was historically significant, influencing writers including René Réamur, Mathurin Jacques Brisson, Georges Cuvier and Carl Linnaeus in compiling their own works. It continued a tradition dating from the seventeenth century whereby the study and classification of specimens operated largely independently of those field observers who studied behaviour and ecology. The German naturalist Erwin Stresemann integrated the two strands as part of modern zoology in the 1920s. The first modern ornithology, intended to describe all the then-known birds worldwide, was published in Latin as Ornithologiae Libri Tres in 1676, and in English, as The Ornithological of Francis Willughby of Middleton, in 1678. Its innovative features were an effective classification system based on anatomical features, and a dichotomous key, which helped readers to identify birds by guiding them to the page describing that group. The authors also placed an asterisk against species of which they had no first-hand knowledge, and were therefore unable to verify.
339 copies were made, at a cost to each subscriber of £52 10s. Sharpe did not contribute after part 13, and was not listed as an author after part 17. The Birds Of Europe was published as 84 quarto parts, each typically containing 56 pages of text and eight plates of illustrations, the latter mainly by the Dutch artist John Gerrard Keulemans, and bound into volumes when all the parts were published. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Francis Bacon had advocated the advancement of knowledge through observation and experiment, and the English Royal Society and its members such as John Ray, John Wilkins and Francis Will Hughby sought to put the empirical method into practice, including travelling widely to collect specimens and information. During the early nineteenth century, a number of ornithologies were written in English. John Gould’s five-volume Birds of European was published between 1832 and 1837. Sharpe, then librarian of the Zoological Society of London, had worked closely with Gould and wanted to expand on his work by including all species in Europe, North Africa, parts of the Middle East and the Atlantic archipelagos of Madeira, the Canary Islands and the Azores. He lacked the resources to undertake this task on his own, so he proposed to Dresser that they work together on this encyclopaedia, using Dresser’s extensive collection of birds and their eggs.
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This page is based on the article A History of the Birds of Europe published in Wikipedia (as of Oct. 31, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
