130 Correspondence. [j^ 



several species treated in the bulletin. It was intended to make the report 

 as complete as possible in this respect. It was being written at the time 

 the third edition of the A. O. U. Check-List was in course of preparation, 

 and both literature and museums were ransacked to make the statements 

 on these two phases of the subject as complete and exact as time and pains 

 could make them. While it is too much to expect that the bulletin is 

 faultless in these regards, nevertheless in the year since it was published 

 no one has pointed out any defects, and during that period of work on 

 ornithological literature, Prof. Cooke has found no omissions that should 

 have been included. No doubt, however, it will be found later that matter 

 was omitted that might profitably have been utilized, and we shall be duly 

 grateful to friends who will call our attention to such omissions with a view 

 to greater completeness in future publications on the same general subject. 



Turning now to the migration side of the question, an entirely different 

 problem is presented. No claim is made or even suggested in the bulletin 

 that the data presented on migration are fuU and complete. In fact the 

 explicit statement is made that the dates of migration "have been obtained 

 principally from the migration schedules" in the possession of the Biologi- 

 cal Survey. Ornithological literature, especially of the present time, is 

 too voluminous for one man, however industrious, to transcribe all the dates 

 of occurrence. In the case of this particular bulletin another item had to 

 be taken into account. The size of the bulletin was necessarily limited to 

 100 pages, and this allowed only a small part even of the migration data 

 now in hand to be used. Our records contain 45,000 cards on the Limicolse, 

 alone, an amount of material far too great to be more than abstracted in a 

 bulletin of such limited size. 



The failure to include in the ShorebLrd bulletin the data from two such 

 important works as the ones our critic mentions: 'Birds of Essex County' 

 by Townsend, and 'Birds of the Cambridge Region' by Brewster, can 

 neither be explained nor defended except on the ground of human liability 

 to error. In a work which necessitates the consultation and transcription 

 of such a vast amount of literature no author is liable long to escape criti- 

 cism for errors and omissions, and we shall endeavor to accept our share of 

 merited rebukes with becoming resignation. 



In conclusion a word may be added in regard to the great mass of ornitho- 

 logical data now on file in the Biological Survey. This includes over 

 700,000 cards from all sources, migration schedules, specimens in museums 

 and in the hands of private collectors, and references to ornithological 

 literature. With regard to the last named source, Prof. Cooke has about 

 completed the abstracting of the standard serials, the government publica- 

 tions, the various State lists, and has made considerable progress with the 

 multitude of non-serial publications. He has consulted nearly every 

 American reference quoted by Coues in his three bibliographies and more 

 than twice as many in addition, the whole making more than 20,000 titles 

 and considerably over 200,000 notes on species. It would seem that this 

 amount of material, while confessedly by no means covering the entire 



