Excerpt from Birds of the British Empire AS something like 5000 species of birds - about half the number known to exist in the habitable globe - are to be found in the dominions of our Queen, it must be obvious that the briefest description of them could not be included within the compass of a small volume like the present one, as its size is necessarily restricted by the limits imposed upon each book in the series of the imperial library. Nevertheless, it is hoped that the present glance at a big subject will prove interesting and valuable to many people. The number of persons interested in birds is unquestion ably enormous but the proportion is probably much smaller of those who require an exhaustive treatise carried out with cosmopolitan comprehensiveness and, in any case, the expense of such a work would be a bar to a wide sale. Later on, if this epitome should secure popular favour, it will be easy to supply the demand for more. With regard to the illustrations in this volume, it should be noted that no attempt, for obvious reasons, has been made to furnish them to exact scale - the great object being to give the best available drawings but in the letterpress descriptions the size of each bird has been carefully given, and the index at the end of the volume will enable the reader to immediately find what he may be looking for, and probably all familiar, and many unfamiliar, names Will be found, modest though the proportions of the book are. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.