text:  As he himself remarks with truth in the preface to his first series of Essays "we can never expect to have a complete history of birds until he who undertakes the task of writing it shall have studied his subject in the field of nature "--and how little this has been attended to even in the ornithology of our own country is sufficiently shown by the errors which till of late disfigured all the received works on this subject and have been copied with implicit faith from one _soi-disant_ naturalist by another