Rowan W. The riddle of migration

Baltimore: The Williams & Wilkins company, 1931. — 176 p.Biological problems can be approached from a number of angles. The specialist views them through the glasses that he habitually wears, with his special interests magnified and in the foreground, a profitable proceeding but likely to suffer from distorted perspective. The gathering up of the viewpoints of the various specialists is a certain way of restoring proportions and arriving at a comprehensive and at the same time an analytical picture of the whole.
The migrations of birds have been a subject of interest for centuries. They have been examined from two avenues of approach. One of them has been worn wide and smooth: the other remains almost untrodden. Field observations and speculations based thereon exist in sufficient volume to fill a library, but few and far between are the attempts of the technically trained biologist — the anatomist, biochemist, biophysicist, physiologist, etc. — to apply his special knowledge to the problem.