446 PautMER, Personalia in Ornithology. rs 
The names of Audubon, Baird and Coues at once call to mind a host 
of incidents associated with their work, but the names of Boddaert 
Briinnich and Pontoppidan recall little more to the average reader 
than obscure references in the Check-List. 
At the 33d Annual Meeting of the American Ornithologists’ 
Union held in San Francisco in May 1915, a Committee on Biog- 
raphy and Bibliography was appointed consisting of Palmer, Cooke 
Deane, Richmond and Stone. The necessity for such a com- 
mittee became evident during the preparation of the Ten Year 
Index to ‘The Auk,’ when in order to bring the data regarding 
authors and biographies up to the requirements of modern bibliog- 
raphy and to the standard of the rest of the Index it became neces- 
sary to add several members to the Index Committee to assist 
in completing names and collecting biographical data. The 
information thus obtained was utilized in the Index of Biographies 
published in the introduction to the Ten Year Index (pp. xi- 
xxili) and in revising the list of deceased members of the Union 
in ‘The Auk’ for April, 1915. 
In order to outline the work of the committee, a letter was 
addressed by the chairman on September 30, 1915, to each of the 
members calling attention to the fact that the duties intrusted to 
the committee necessitated a definite plan of work in biography 
and bibliography; that in biography the first duty was to assist the 
editor of ‘The Auk’ in the preparation of current obituary notices, 
in bibliography it was evident that the committee had neither the 
time nor means to undertake a comprehensive work such as that 
projected by the late Dr. Elliott Coues, but that a practical plan 
could probably be worked out which would result in a material 
contribution to existing bibliographies of ornithology. A tentative 
plan was suggested which met the approval of the members and 
with some minor modifications has formed the basis of the activities 
of the year. Under this plan the work was distributed under three 
headings — Biography, Bibliography and Manuscripts — including 
ten subjects, as follows: 
(a) In Biography 
1 Biographies, including obituary notices of A. O. U. members. 
2 Brief sketches of the foreign members of the A. O. U. 
3 An index to published portraits of A. O. U. members. 
