342 Obituary. 



his views on the limits of specific variation and nomenclature 

 would not perhaps commend themselves to present-day- 

 workers. All he wrote, however, was marked by a thorough 

 and a rigid accuracy of description and attention to detail, 

 and he took special pains to get his illustrations executed 

 and reproduced in the most perfect manner possible, so that 

 his monographs and the 'Birds of Europe' were as monu- 

 ments of ornithological literature. His death is a great loss 

 to us all, and removes one more link in the chain connecting 

 us with the giants of the middle of the nineteenth century. 



Daniel Giraud Elliot. 



From ' Science ' we learn with great regret of the death 

 of Dr. Elliot, which took place on the 22nd of December 

 last, from pneumonia, in his home in New York. He had 

 reached the advanced age of 80 years and had become the 

 " doyen " of American naturalists. 



Born in New York City, March 7, 1835, Dr. Elliot Avas 

 the fourth son of George T. and Rebecca Giraud Elliot. 

 His father was of old Connecticut stock, which had settled 

 in America in the sixteenth century, and was of Scottish 

 origin, while on his mother's side he was descended from 

 French ancestors. 



Delicate in his early years, he was unable to take a 

 college course and spent much time in travelling. He came 

 to London in 1859, and as he relates in a eulogy of our 

 late editor, Dr. P. L. Sclater, there met him and many 

 of the other mid- Victorians and the early M. B. O. U.^s. 

 During the sixties he was busily engaged in forming a 

 collection of birds and preparing his monographs of the 

 Tetraonidse and the Pittidse. His collections passed into 

 the possession of the American Museum of Natural History 

 in New Y'ork in 1868, and form the foundation of the vast 

 stores which have since been accumulated there. During 

 these years, as he tells us in an address before the Linnean 

 Society of New York in 1914, there were only three working 

 ornithologists in America besides himself — George Lawrence 



