Despite the important role that birds played in Charles Darwin's work – from the Galapagos mockingbirds and finches to the fancy pigeons of the Origin of Species (1859) and Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868), to the battling, preening, singing males of The Descent of Man (1871) – Darwinism's initial impact on British ornithology has been little investigated. Paul Farber's study of the emergence of ornithology as a scientific discipline stopped at 1850, with ornithology established and classification its central concern. Darwin's theory was thus positioned to have either little or momentous effect: ornithologists could continue on their merry avian way, describing and classifying without regard to genealogy, or could welcome Darwin's insights as providing a path to the holy grail of a truly natural system of classification. The Cambridge ornithologist Alfred Newton (1829–1907), writing the entry on ‘Ornithology’ for the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1885, argued that he and his colleagues had taken the latter path: ‘there was possibly no branch of Zoology in which so many of the best informed and consequently the most advanced of its workers sooner accepted the principle of Evolution than Ornithology’. Newton has himself been frequently invoked as the primary evidence of the ornithological embrace of Darwin, and casually cast as an early convert to Darwinism, even if one who played a comparatively minor role in the ensuing cultural and scientific debates over it. Gavin de Beer has called him one of those who ‘rallied to [Darwin's] side’ in the year after the Origin's publication. De Beer, Bernard Cohen and Janet Browne have all recounted Newton's sudden conversion to Darwinism upon reading the 1858 Darwin–Wallace paper for the Linnean Society.