Alfred Newton's contribution to ornithology: a conservative quest for facts rather than grand theories

Alfred Newton (1829-1907) was a founding member of the British Ornithologists' Union, served as editor of The Ibis, and became one of the best-known British ornithologists of the nineteenth-century. Between 1855 and 1864 he travelled in Europe and North America, making a trip to Iceland in 1858 with John Wolley in search of information about the Great Auk Pinguinus impennis. In 1866 Newton obtained the chair of Zoology and Comparative Zoology at the University of Cambridge, where he remained for rest of his career. An unenthusiastic teacher, Newton nevertheless encouraged successive generations of young ornithologists through the soirees he held in his college rooms. Newton published extensively, but his most significant publication was the Dictionary of Birds (1896). Newton's death marked the beginning of the end of a long period in which scientific ornithology comprised little more than taxonomy and nomenclature, although Newton was also instrumental in initiating conservation legislation. Extremely conservative in most aspects of his life, Newton was nevertheless the first ornithologist to appreciate the significance of natural selection. He therefore constitutes an important figure in an era of ornithology that immediately precedes the current interest in field ornithology.