He was able to examine specimens of Australian birds that reached England in the final twenty years of the 18th century, and was responsible for providing English names for many of them.

He named some of Australia's most famous birds, including the emu, sulphur-crested cockatoo, wedge-tailed eagle, superb lyrebird, Australian magpie, magpie-lark, white-throated needletail and pheasant coucal.

In that work, as with Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, he did not attach importance to the names of the species that he described.

Later, Latham realised that only the use of the Linnean binomial system would give him the honour of originating a species' scientific name.

However, it was too late, because Johann Friedrich Gmelin had already published his own version of Linnaeus' Systema Naturæ, in which he had given a scientific name to Latham's species.

[4] He had a supplement to Index Ornithologicus, containing additional scientific names, published as Supplementum Indicis Ornithologici in 1801.

[8] Beginning in 1821, when Latham was in his eighties, he published an expanded version of his earlier work in eleven volumes, with the title A General History of Birds.

The ornithologist Alfred Newton later wrote in Encyclopædia Britannica that: "his defects as a compiler, which had been manifest before, rather increased with age, and the consequences were not happy.