European and North American Variants
Some regard the North American and Eurasian (F. columbarius) populations as two distinct species. The first modern taxonomist to describe the Merlin was Carl Linnaeus, a Swede who reported his type specimen came from America. Thirteen years after Linnaeus's description Marmaduke Tunstall recognized the Eurasian birds as a distinct taxon aesalon in his Ornithologica Britannica. If two species of Merlins are recognized, the Old World birds would thus bear the scientific name F. aesalon.
Read more about this topic: Merlin (bird)
Famous quotes containing the words european, north, american and/or variants:
“European society has always been divided into classes in a way that American society never has been. A European writer considers himself to be part of an old and honorable tradition—of intellectual activity, of letters—and his choice of a vocation does not cause him any uneasy wonder as to whether or not it will cost him all his friends. But this tradition does not exist in America.”
—James Baldwin (1924–1987)
“Exporting Church employees to Latin America masks a universal and unconscious fear of a new Church. North and South American authorities, differently motivated but equally fearful, become accomplices in maintaining a clerical and irrelevant Church. Sacralizing employees and property, this Church becomes progressively more blind to the possibilities of sacralizing person and community.”
—Ivan Illich (b. 1926)
“We talked about and that has always been a puzzle to me
why American men think that success is everything
when they know that eighty percent of them are not
going to succeed more than to just keep going and why
if they are not why do they not keep on being
interested in the things that interested them when
they were college men and why American men different
from English men do not get more interesting as they
get older.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“Nationalist pride, like other variants of pride, can be a substitute for self-respect.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)