188 Harris, Notes on Harris's Sparrow. [April 



October, which I have figured along with a fine male. The female 

 differing in nothing from the latter. 



" All our exertions to discover the nest of this species were fruit- 

 less, and I concluded by thinking that it proceeds further north- 

 ward to breed." 



The work in which this supposed discovery was announced was 

 published in 1844, four years after the second edition of Nuttall's 

 ' Manual ' appeared. Since this manual was the first American work 

 on ornithology, excepting Wilson's, to go into a second edition, it 

 was presumably widely known among ornithologists, and it is 

 not easy to understand why Audubon and his coworkers were in 

 ignorance of their lack of claim to Nuttall's Mourning Finch. 



During the twenty-five or thirty years following Audubon's 

 visit to the Missouri haunts of the Sparrow, practically nothing 

 was learned of its life-history or distribution, and the few scat- 

 tered specimens that were taken were all from the same general 

 region. A specimen furnished by Lieut. Couch, taken at Fort 

 Leavenworth on October 21, 1854, formed part of the material 

 used by Prof. Baird in his epochal work in 1858, as did another 

 taken at the same point on April 21, 1856, by Dr. Hayden, of 

 Lieut. Warren's Pacific Coast Surveys party. Dr. Hayden took 

 three other specimens further up the river in the same year. Dr. 

 P. R. Hoy, who collected in the type region in 1854, took a speci- 

 men on May 7, and on May 13 met with a troop of fifteen or 

 twenty. There are a few other records from the Missouri Valley 

 and one from Texas (Dresser, Ibis, 1865) prior to the numerous 

 ornithological activities of the early seventies. Dr. J. A. Allen, 

 collecting in the interest of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, 

 had his headquarters at Fort Leavenworth during the first ten days 

 of May, 1871, and found Harris's Sparrows exceedingly abundant 

 in the bottom timber on the Missouri side of the river. He added 

 a few field notes on behavior, appearance, etc, and took a series of 

 specimens. Baird, Brewer, and Ridgway state that from the time 

 of its discovery in 1834 up to 1872 but little information had been 

 obtained in regard to the Sparrow's general habits, its geographical 

 distribution, or its mode of breeding, single specimens only having 

 been taken at considerable intervals in the valley of the Missouri 

 and elsewhere. In 1874 Dr. Coues brought together all the avail- 



