134 OltlGIXAL ME.MBEKS. | 



Dr. R. Bowdler Sharpc, and has usually had the lionour of 

 occupyiuii" the cliair at its meetings and of delivering an 

 inaugural address at the commencement of each session. 



With the British Association for the Advancement of 

 Science Sclater has had a long connexion, having become a 

 member in 1 847, at the second Oxford meeting_, and having 

 attended its meetings with few exceptions for many years. 

 For several years he w^as Secretary of Section D, and at the 

 Bristol meeting in 1875 he was President of that Section 

 and delivered an address " On the present state of our 

 Knowledge of Geographical Zoology." In 187G he was 

 elected one of the two General Secretaries of the Association, 

 together with Sir Douglas Galton, and served in that capacity 

 for five years, thereby becoming an ex officio member of the 

 Council, at the meetings of which he is still a constant 

 attendant. 



In 1886 Sclater began the transfer of his private collection 

 of American bird-skins to the British Museum. This col- 

 lection contained 8824 specimens, representing 3158 species, 

 belonging to the Orders Passeres, Picarise, and Psittaci. It 

 may be remarked that when he began his collection at 

 Oxford in 1847 he intended to collect birds of every kind and 

 from all parts of the world, but after a few years he resolved 

 to confine his attention particularly to the Ornithology of 

 South and Central America, and to collect specimens only 

 in the Orders above mentioned, which were at that time 

 generally less known than the others and of which the 

 specimens are of a more manageable size for the private 

 collector. 



At the time of the beginning of this transfer, which was 

 only completed in 1890, Sclater agreed to prepare some of 

 the volumes of the British Museum ' Catalogue of Birds/ 

 relating to the groups to which he had paid special attention. 

 In accordance with this arrangement, by the expenditure of 

 fully two years of his leisure time on each volume, he pre- 

 pared the eleventh volume in 1886, the fourteenth in 1888, 

 the fifteenth in 1890, and half of the nineteenth in 1891. 

 When the ' Challenger ' Expedition started to go round 



