398 Palmer, In Memoriam: Theodore Nicholas Gill. [oct. 



in the hope of working out ' anatomical characters that would co- 

 ordinate with the external characters generally used to distingush 

 families.' In this effort he failed utterly and abandoned the under- 

 taking, declining to complete the introduction in which his views 

 on classification were so at variance with those of the authors. 

 This introduction was finally completed by Doctor Coues. Thus 

 began the first of several literary ventures in which Coues and Gill 

 were associated and which finally resulted unhappily a few months 

 before Coues' death in the severe straining if not in the breaking 

 of a friendship of nearly forty years standing. 



For present purposes the contribution of 1873 is chiefly interest- 

 ing because it contains Gill's definition of birds and the brief state- 

 ment of some of his views on Avian classification. This definition 

 is remarkable from the fact that it describes a bird in a single sen- 

 tence, but this sentence includes 312 words and fills the greater 

 part of a page! As an example of word building about a single 

 idea it is one of the most comprehensive in the annals of ornithol- 

 ogy. The first few lines carrying the description through the 

 brain will suffice to illustrate his ability in writing definitions : 



" Birds are abranchiate vertebrates, with a brain filling the cranial 

 cavity, the cerebral portion of which is moderately well developed, 

 the corpora striata connected by a small anterior commissure (no 

 corpus callosum developed), prosencephalic hemispheres large, 

 the optic lobes lateral, the cerebral transversely multifissured," etc. 



This definition recalls the anecdote mentioned by Doctor Lucas x 

 in connection with the publication of the Century Dictionary 

 some years later. Coues was in charge of the preparation of the 

 zoological terms and Gill associated with him prepared chiefly the 

 definitions of mammals and fishes. When Gill submitted a defi- 

 nition of the family of Giraffes Coues read it carefully and turning 

 to Gill exclaimed, "That isn't English, it is Choctaw." "No," 

 said Gill, "it is an exact definition of the family Giraffidse," and 

 as such it was duly incorporated in the Dictionary. 



Gill's later ornithological papers appeared in ' The Osprey ' during 

 the four years that it was published under his supervision. Before 

 considering these papers it may be interesting to mention some of 



i Am. Mus. Journ., XV, p. 10. 1915. 



