Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union early 20th century called themselves 'oologists', though the distinction between the notionally scientific discipline of oology and simple egg-collecting was blurred. Identification of any but the most common and distinctive species usually entailed the collection of specimens to be made into study skins. Modern field-guides did not exist and few people could afford the massive multi-volume, lavishly illustrated, handbooks of John Gould and Gregory Mathews. However, both Archibald J. Campbell and Alfred North had produced comprehensive guides to what was known about the nests and eggs of Australian birds, with illustrations of the eggs rather than of the birds themselves,
What Is History? sometimes been made to treat history as a branch of sociology." About the rise of social history as a subject at the expense of political history, Carr wrote:"Social history is the bedrock. To study the bedrock alone is not enough; and becomes tedious; perhaps this is what happened to Annales. But you can't dispense with it". Through Carr himself had insisted that history was a social science, he regretted the decline of history as a discipline relative to the other social sciences, which he saw as a part of a conservative trend. Carr wrote: "History is preoccupied with fundamental processes