OhkuaTy. Ill 



abroad — by his many friends and correspondents, and 

 perhaps most of all in America, with the avifauna of which 

 he was so familiar. 



As is well known, the special branch of the subject to 

 which Sclater devoted his earlier years, was the study of 

 Central and South American birds, of which he made a very 

 fine collection, now in the British Museum. Many of his 

 writings of that time had reference to them, and his volumes 

 of the British Museum Catalogue dealt with them alone. But 

 our space will not allow us to give a full list of his in- 

 numerable papers, or even larger works, for which the reader 

 must be referred to Bulletin No. 49 of the United States 

 National Museum ; shorter details will be found in the 

 Jubilee Volume of ' The Ibis,' and in the forthcoming 

 number of that periodical. He was always a keen observer 

 of British birds, both at his home in Hampshire and else- 

 where, and a warm supporter of any project for their 

 preservation. Sclater's greatest claim to the gratitude of 

 posterity will by many be considered his work on Geo- 

 graphical Distribution and Classification. As early as 1858 

 he began to consider the first of these subjects, and before 

 long formulated his views, suggesting the division of the 

 world (from ornithological considerations) into the six 

 regions now very generally accepted : Palrearctic, Ethiopian, 

 Indian, Australian, Nearctic, and Neotropical. Later he 

 wrote, with his son William, on the geographical distribution 

 of mammals, while in 1880 he propounded a Classification of 

 the Class " Aves " in the pages of ' The Ibis.' 



Sclater was born at Tangier Park in Hampshire, in 

 November, 1829, and belonged to the old county family 

 now represented by his nephew, Lord Basing ; he was 

 educated at Winchester and Oxford, where he was a Scholar 

 of Corpus Christi (college, and took a first class in Mathe- 

 matics. At Oxford he made the acquaintance of Strickland 

 and Gould, but after obtaining his Fellowship he soon left 

 for a prolonged tour in America and Canada, including the 

 backwoods from Lake Superior to the Mississippi. He met 

 on this occasion the great Now World Ornithologists, Cassin, 



VOL. IX. 8 



