Turning finally to the bill, I would call attention to the sketch (Fig. 2) which shows the average adult bill of the male of _hyperboreus_ contrasted with that of “_barrovianus_.” When one realizes that the variation in the bills of all female gulls is much greater than that of the males and that young birds only very slowly acquire adult dimensions, it becomes evident that “_barrovianus_” is _not_ “very readily recognizable by its usually smaller size and particularly smaller bill.” One may guess cleverly that large birds belong to one race and small ones to another, but without reference to the labels the guesses may be astray by a continent’s width.
[Illustration: Fig. 2. Bill of average _Larus hyperboreus_, male, life size, drawn to scale. The broken line shows the bill of the alleged race.]
So far as I can see the case of _barrovianus_ stands where it did in 1906 and it is a pity that there should have been any need of reopening it. Fortunately the merits of this and similar cases do not rest upon individual bias, but they are determined by the A. O. U. Committee which, as far as North American birds are concerned, acts somewhat as a supreme court rendering verdicts according to evidence presented. Let us hope they will give us “safe and sane” subspecies rather than the shadowy indefinite groups of averages that too often are named as geographical races. It should be remembered that while a name is a handle to a fact, too many handles would make a door or a basket perfectly useless. Ornithology will become a wilderness of handles if every difference is named at sight,—a wilderness of subspecies founded more on hasty opinions than on digested facts. A step farther and we shall have the psychological subspecies in which the expectant mental attitude of the subspecialist (if I may be pardoned the word) will play the most important rôle. In our gropings after the truth it is wasteful of too much time to spend so much of it stumbling over names of groups so poorly defined that they convey only a vague meaning to a few specialists and none at all to everybody else. Decking the subspecies in all the glittering panoply of diagnosis, dimension, and distribution makes of it an impressive spectacle, but this does not necessarily make of it a good subspecies.