THE AUK: 



A QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF 



ORNITHOLOGY. 



VOL. XX. January, 1903. No. i 



THE A. O. U. CHECK-LIST — ITS HISTORY AND ITS 



FUTURE.! 



BV J. A. ALLEN. 



At the first Congress of tlie American Ornithologists' Union, 

 held in September, 1883, a committee was appointed on the ' Clas- 

 sification and Nomenclature of North American Birds.' This 

 Committee was charged with the duty of preparing a Check-List of 

 the birds found in North America north of Mexico. It was a task 

 requiring much labor, and nearly three years passed before the 

 results of its work were made public, in the form of a volume of 

 400 pages, entitled ' The Code of Nomenclature and Check-List of 

 North American Birds, adopted by the American Ornithologists' 

 Union, being the Report of the Committee of the Union on Classi- 

 fication and Nomenclature.' This work was published in 1886. 

 Seven supplements to the Check-List were issued during the 

 )ears 1889 to 1895. In 1895 a second edition of the Check-List, 

 without the 'Code,' was issued, which embodied the changes and 

 additions made in the supplements, and considerable modification 

 of the matter relating to the geographical distribution of the 

 species and subspecies. Since that date four additional supple- 

 ments have been issued, the eleventh of the series having been 

 published in July of the present year. 



^ Read at the Twentieth Congress of the American Ornithologists' Union, 

 Washington, D. C, Nov. 19, 1902. 



