122 Patmer, In Memoriam: Wells W. Cooke. aoe 
in the northern part of the Territory but was there only a few 
months when he was stricken with typho-malaria and was obliged 
to abandon his work. Hereturned north and staid at Moorhead, 
Minn., opposite Fargo, N. Dak., while he was recovering from the 
attack of fever. Here he continued teaching until the following 
summer when he left for Vermont to enter upon his college work. 
The years thus spent in teaching in the Mississippi Valley are 
important not only because they afforded an opportunity for field 
work among the birds of widely separated localities but because 
they mark the beginning of codperative observations on migration 
in the United States and the publication of the most detailed annual 
records of migration for a wide area that have ever appeared. The 
earlier reports which appeared in 1882 and 1883 brought the author 
into correspondence with observers in the middle west and gained 
for him substantial recognition by the American Ornithologists’ 
Union which at its first meeting appointed a committee to codperate - 
with him ! and in 1884 elected him an active member of the Union. 
How or where Cooke first conceived the idea of coéperative 
observations on the movements of birds is not mentioned in any 
of his reports, but it is important to recall that similar work had 
been undertaken in Europe a few years before. In Germany 
observations were begun by Blasius, Reichenow and Schalow about 
1876,2 and in Scotland Harvie Brown and Cordeaux collected 
reports on the autumn migration of 1879 from light houses on the 
coasts of England and Scotland.’ In both the German and English 
reports the observations begin in the autumn and continue through 
the winter and spring as do those of Cooke’s first reports. In a 
review of the English report Dr. J. A. Allen suggested as early as 
1880 * that it would be desirable and not impracticable to establish 
an ornithological bureau to which observations could be sent and 
elaborated, and’ that nowhere were conditions more favorable for 
systematic work than in the United States. This suggestion was 
made five years before the plan became an accomplished fact in 
the organization of the work now carried on by the Biological Sur- 
1 Bull. Nuttall Orn. Club, VIII, pp. 225, 230, 1883. 
2Zur Vogelkunde Deutschlands, I Jahresbericht (1876) des Ausschusses fiir Beobach- 
tungs-Stationen der Végel Deutschlands, J. f. O., 1877, pp. 278-342. 
3 Bull. Nuttall Orn. Club, V, pp. 175-177, 1880; see also Ibid., VIII, pp. 228-231, 1883. 
