V< ?'i9L5 X ] Palmer, In Memoriam: Theodore Nicholas Gill. 405 



at times to locate a certain book or paper which he had laid aside 

 a few weeks before. 



The last years of his life were quiet and uneventful. Three or 

 four years before his death he suffered a severe paralytic stroke 

 from which he never fully recovered. His cheerfulness and good 

 spirits remained to the last but his strength gradually ebbed away 

 until he found difficulty in getting about. In September, 1914, 

 he moved out to the suburbs to spend the winter with his brother 

 Herbert A. Gill, and a few days later was confined to his bed. 

 On the morning of the 25th he was apparently as bright as usual, 

 and after breakfast asked for the news of the day especially of 

 the war which he followed carefully — but before noon he passed 

 away suddenly. 



In the death of Doctor Gill the American Ornithologists' Union 

 has sustained a great loss, not merely in the absence of his genial 

 personality and the kindly suggestions and criticisms on various 

 knotty questions of nomenclature and bibliography, but chiefly in 

 the lost opportunity which can never be regained of utilizing his 

 broad knowledge and unsurpassed judgment in matters of taxon- 

 omy. In that great and pressing problem which has been carefully 

 avoided for three decades but which cannot be ignored much longer 

 — the revision of the classification of North American birds — 

 Gill's intimate knowledge of other groups would have been invalu- 

 able. His broad views would have acted as a balance wheel on 

 the ideas of some of the specialists in speciation who in their enthu- 

 siasm for minute differences are apt to throw the classification of 

 birds out of gear in its relation to the taxonomy of other classes. 

 No one in this country or generation was better able to appreciate 

 the true value of the higher groups or to coordinate the families, 

 suborders and orders of birds with the corresponding divisions of 

 mammals, fishes or mollusks. Without some such standardization 

 of groups we shall never attain a really satisfactory and permanent 

 basis of classification. 



