It was with some misgiving that I set out in my attempt to identify the birds referred to by Homer in the Iliad and the Odyssey. His greatness as a poet seemed to offer no guarantee of his faithfulness as an observer in an age when science as such did not exist, and the spirit of accuracy it begets was as yet unawakened. Moreover, I had long observed Homer to be before all else a poet of action. His references to natural objects are largely by way of illustration—short, crisp asides, as it were, in which the selected word and the packed phrase reveal the economy of his art in matters subordinate to the main theme. His references to colour in birds are extremely rare; those regarding form are epithetic, and recur with something of the conventional formality of the epithets applied to his heroes. However, whether in the form of epithet or by special description, Homer's portrayal of birds deals chiefly with essentials. In this lie the advantage and the disadvantage of the Homeric method for one whose main purpose is concerned with what in Homer was merely contributory to a fuller one. The advantage of such a method is that it forces essentials to the front, and the disadvantage, that the references to these may be limited by the nature of the matter they serve to illustrate; or that, being references to the characteristics of a class of birds, they may not suffice for the identification of a particular member of that class.