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U.S. NATIONAL MUSEUM BULLETIN 23 7 



from the published literature, but from the unpublished notes of 

 volunteer contributors. For this purpose he maintained an enormous 

 correspondence with a host of amateur and professional ornithologists. 

 He was modest, amicable, generous, and self-effacing; his friends were 

 legion. In the introductions to the successive volumes he produced, 

 he acknowledges contributions and help from more than 800 individ- 

 uals by name. 



Mr. Bent entrusted the preparation of two life histories in the first 

 volume, those of the pufRn and the great auk, to his friend Dr. Charles 

 Wendell TovNOisend. The next four volumes he wrote himself, except 

 for a short account of the New Mexican duck by its discoverer, 

 Wharton Huber, in volmne 4. Starting with volmne 6, which contains 

 five histories by Dr. Townsend and one by Thomas E. Penard, Mr. 

 Bent entrusted more and more accounts to others, especially when he 

 felt others were more familiar with the species than he. The total in 

 the 20 volumes is 170 histories, contributed by 28 authors, as follows: 



Though a fall from a tree durmg a youthful egging exploit left him 

 with a permanent tremble in his right hand, Mr. Bent possessed a 

 remarkable physique and amazing vitality and drive. His mental 

 facilities remained sharp and clear, and he researched and wrote 

 almost to the day of his death on Dec. 30, 1954 at the age of 89. In 

 the late 1940's, realizing he probably would not live to finish the final 

 volumes, he asked the Nuttall Ornithological Club of Cambridge, 

 Mass., which he had joined while a senior at Harvard in 1888, to assume 

 the responsibility for their completion. The Nuttall Club, then 

 under the presidency of James Lee Peters, was happy to accept this 

 obligation. Shortly after Peters died in 1952, Mr. Bent appointed 

 as his literary executor my close personal friend and fellow member 

 of the Nuttall Club, the late Wendell Taber. 



At the time of his death, Mr. Bent had finished the accounts of 

 the icterids for volume 20, and Taber saw it through the press in 

 1958. He had also completed a respectable number of fringillid 



