The Days of a Man 1879 



may have been technically right from his own 

 point of view. 



In his early twenties Gill went on an expedition 

 to the island of Trinidad, his only field work of any 

 kind. In later years he seldom left Washington, 

 living at the Cosmos Club but spending the better 

 part of every day about the Smithsonian. Of 

 peculiar temperament, he failed to finish any single 

 large piece of work, but published between 1858 

 and his death in 1914 some three hundred minor 

 papers which in the aggregate have given his 

 name an imperishable place in the history of Ich- 

 Af aster in thyology. In 1905 I dedicated my chief general 



Taxonomy work> A Q uide tQ the Stu( J y Q f Fishes," tO "TheO- 



dore Gill, Ichthyologist, Philosopher, Critic, Master 

 in Taxonomy." 



Taxonomy, I may explain, is technical classification of 

 organisms an attempt to express as well as possible by dif- 

 ferent categories (order, family, genus, species) the lines of 

 descent and ramification through which animals and plants 

 have acquired their present forms. A classification truly 

 natural that is, based on structure, embryological develop- 

 ment, geological history, and genetic descent is a transcript 

 of our actual knowledge of the evolution of the forms in ques- 

 tion. From this point of view, Taxonomy is the perfected 

 product of all Natural History research. 



Dr. Elliott Coues, an accurate investigator as 

 well as a brilliant and versatile writer with a special 

 gift for bringing his work into popular compre- 

 hension, was naturalist of the Geological Survey 

 and the leading American ornithologist after Baird 

 turned away from birds to administrative work. 

 Coues' bird biographies rank with the best, though 

 perhaps Irving's sketch of the Bobolink and Muir's 



n 176 : 



