Vol i906 HI ] Noies and News - 357 



Colombia. These collections also now belong in great part to the American 

 Museum, acquired partly by purchase and partly as a gift from Mr. Batty. 

 Mr. Batty was born about sixty years ago at Springfield, Mass., where 

 he received' a high school education and fitted for college, but out-of-door 

 pursuits and a fondness for adventure led him to early abandon his college 

 course. He had a great fondness for natural history, and in 1873 was a 

 collector of birds and mammals in the mountains of Colorado for the 

 Hayden Survey. For many years he was in business as a taxidermist in 

 New York City, and published a book on 'Taxidermy and Home Decora- 

 tion' which has had extensive sale. Later he engaged in plume hunting, 

 in the early days of that unfortunate business, for this purpose visiting 

 Florida, western Mexico, Central America, and northern South America, 

 which continent he traversed from ocean to ocean. For the last eight 

 years he was engaged in legitimate natural history collecting, and secured 

 many new species in Colombia and Panama, before his formal engagement 

 by the American Museum. He was an expert hunter, and unusually 

 successful in capturing the larger Carnivores. He was a man of great 

 physical endurance, courage, persistency, and enthusiasm, and was proba- 

 bly familiar with a larger portion of the wilds of tropical America than any 

 other traveller or explorer. During the last three years he has collected 

 extensively in the States of Durango, Sinaloa, Jalisco, and Chiapas, 

 Mexico, he having sent over 3000 mammals and about 6000 birds to the 

 New York Museum as the result of his labors. At the time of his death 

 he was under contract with this institution to continue his work across 

 Guatemala to the Pacific coast, and thence transfer his field of operations 

 to the still very imperfectly explored regions of southwestern Colombia. 

 His untimely death is thus a serious loss to the institution he has served 

 so faithfully. Personally he was a man of the most kindly nature, trustful, 

 and thoroughly conscientious in his work. 



Frank J. Thompson, formerly (1885-1896) an Associate of the American 

 Ornithologists' Union, died in Culpepper, Va., his place of birth, May 29, 

 at the age of 79 years. Mr. Thompson was a practical naturalist, and 

 traveled extensively in the Old World tropics as a collector of living wild 

 animals for zoological gardens. As stated in ' Forest and Stream ' (of June 

 16, 1906): "Mr. Thompson was so well known as being better acquainted 

 with wild animals than anyone else that he was appointed the first superin- 

 tendent of the Zoological Garden of Philadelphia, having been summoned 

 to take that place while traveling in Australia. Subsequently he became 

 superintendent of the Zoological Gardens in Cincinnati and in Buffalo. 

 Perhaps no other man ever had so great an experience with the wild game 

 of the tropical world at large, and with his hunting experience was mingled 

 a knowledge of the life-habits of these animals, which, if written out, would 

 make the adventures of a multitude of famous book writers of these later 

 days seem insignificant. Mr. Thompson had been a contributor to ' Forest 



