Chapter 1 Pictures and Records of Birds up to the Invention of Printing and the Development of the Woodcut

Chapter 2 The Art of Printing. Woodcuts and Engravings. Belon and the Encyclopedists

Chapter 3 The Progress of Engraving. The First Works Containing Ornithological Plates. Information about Fauna Given in Descriptions of Countries and in Travel Books up to the Last Quarter of the 17th Century

Chapter 4 Willughby and John Ray. The First Works in which Plates are Prominent. Works on Fauna and Journeys up to the Last Third of the 18th Century

Chapter 5 Progress in Descriptive Ornithology, Systematics and Nomenclature. Linnæus. Brisson

Chapter 6 Buffon and the ‚Planches Enluminées‘. The Ornithological Literature in the Last Third of the 18th Century

Chapter 7 A Brief Survey of the Literature and Iconography of Descriptive Ornithology in the 19th and 20th Centuries