Obituary. 357 



from all parts of the globe, a record of the proceedings 

 being subsequently printed in the ' Bulletin' of the Club. 



Although Dr. Sharpe had not much leisure for foreign 

 travel beyond an occasional trip to Paris or Berlin, or an 

 autumn holiday in Norway, his official position once enabled 

 him to undertake a notable journey to India for the purpose 

 of superintending the package and transport of a valuable 

 collection of birds and mammals which (on the condition of 

 his taking charge of it) had been presented to the British 

 Museum by Mr. A. O. Hume, of Simla. Accordingly Sharpe 

 went out to arrange for its safe dispateh to London, a 

 matter of no slight difficulty, seeing that it contained 

 no less than 63,000 birds, 18,500 eggs, and 500 mammals. 

 This incident recalls the fact that in several other instances 

 the Nation has been indebted to Dr. Sharpe for most valuable 

 collections presented to the Museum more or less through 

 his instrumentality. To quote from his address as President 

 of the Fourth International Ornithological Congress, held in 

 London in June 1905, the following lines will shew how 

 enormously the collections under his charge at the Museum 

 were increased during his term of office : " It has been up 

 to the present time (1905) impossible to prepare an exact 

 estimate of the number of birds and eggs in the British 

 Museum ... At the lowest computation the specimens 

 must number 400,000, and at the time when I assumed 

 office in 1872 a liberal estimate of the collection of birds 

 and eggs would be 35,000 : it probably did not exceed 

 30,000." 



The services thus rendered to science by Dr. Sharpe, in 

 the care of and enormous increase to the collections under 

 his charge, in the valuable Catalogue of Birds already referred 

 to, besides a subsequent ' Hand-list of Birds ' in five volumes, 

 and in the numerous monographs and papers of importance 

 which were independently published by him, are such as 

 have never been achieved by one man in his lifetime, and in 

 the opinion of his fellow workers, who are best qualified to 

 express their views on the subject, some adequate recognition 

 of such services by the Treasury on the recommendation of 



