486 Notes and News. [oS 



William Earl Dodge Scott, a well known ornithologist, died suddenly 

 at Saranac Lake, New York, August 23, 1910. He was born in Brooklyn, 

 New York, April 22, 1852. He was a son of Moses Warren and Juliet 

 Ann (Cornell) Scott, and a great-grandson of Moses Scott, a surgeon in 

 the Revolutionary army and a member of General Washington's staff. 

 His father died when young Scott was five years old, at about which time 

 he was seized with a lameness that defied the best medical skill and proved 

 a serious disability throughout his life, rendering a cane, and often crutches, 

 necessary as an aid in walking. His early education was conducted by 

 a private governess, but later he attended a German academy in Brooklyn, 

 and spent a year at a boarding school in Providence, Rhode Island. He 

 was a member of the first freshman class at the opening of Cornell Uni- 

 versity in 1868, and the following year entered the Lawrence Scientific 

 School at Harvard University as a special student in zoology under the 

 great teacher Louis Agassiz, and in due course received from this institu- 

 tion the degree of B. S. in 1873. During his residence in Cambridge he 

 became one of the original members of the Nuttall Ornithological Club, 

 and in 1884, while residing in Arizona, was elected a Corresponding Mem- 

 ber of the American Ornithologists' Union. Two years later, on his return 

 to New York, he was elected to active membership, which he retained till 

 1894. 



Mr. Scott is remembered by the older members of the A. 0. U. as an 

 enthusiastic and, notwithstanding his life-long physical infirmity, ener- 

 getic and indefatigable field ornithologist, conscientious and accurate in 

 his observations and an expert collector. His first notable ornithological 

 trip was to Coalburg, in the Kanawha Valley, West Virginia, when he was 

 twenty years old, the results of this trip being published in 1872, in a paper 

 in the 'Proceedings' of the Boston Society of Natural History (Vol. XV, 

 pp. 219-227) entitled ' Partial List of the Summer Birds of Kanawha County, 

 West Virginia,' In 1874 he spent several months collecting birds in the 

 vicinity of Warrensburg, Missouri, for a normal school at that place, the 

 results of his work at this point being given in 'Notes on Birds observed 

 during the spring Migration in Western Missouri (Bull. Nutt. Orn. Club, 

 IV, July, 1879, pp. 139-147). 



In 1875 he was employed by the trustees of Princeton College, in form- 

 ing, at Plainfield, New Jersey, a collection of birds, and the next year he 

 was appointed Acting Curator of the Princeton College Museum of Biology, 

 which position he held till 1885, when he was made Curator of the Depart- 

 ment of Ornithology, a position he held until his death, though compelled 

 by ill health to be a non-resident of Princeton during the later years of his 

 life. 



His connection with the Princeton Museum was the beginning of a 

 long period of field work, at first in the interest of the University, but 

 later independently. During the winter of 1875-76 he collected in Sump- 

 ter County, Florida; in the fall of 1876 and spring of 1877 along the coast 

 of New Jersey. In 1878 he worked for a number of weeks in the Twin 



