Obituary. 647 



elected one of the two General Secretaries of the Association, 

 together with Sir Douglas Gal ton, and served in that capacity 

 for Hve years, thereby becoming an ex officio member of the 

 Council, at the meetings of which he continued to be a 

 constant attendant. 



In 1886 Sclater began the transfer of his private collection 

 of American bird-skins to the British Museum. This col- 

 lection contained 8824 specimens, representing 3158 species, 

 belonging to the Orders Passeres, Picarise, and Psittaci. It 

 may be remarked that when he began his collection at 

 Oxford in 1847 he intended to collect birds of every kind and 

 from all parts of the world, but after a few years he resolved 

 to confine his attention particularly to the Ornithology of 

 South and Central America, and to collect specimens only 

 in the Orders above mentioned, which were at that time 

 generally less known than the others and of which the 

 specimens are of a more manageable size for the private 

 collector. 



At the time of the beginning of this transfer, which was 

 ordy completed in 1890, Sclater agreed to prepare some of 

 the volumes of the British Museum ' Catalogue of Birds,' 

 relating to the groups to which he had paid special attention. 

 In accordance with this arrangement, hy the expenditure of 

 fully two years of his leisure time on each volume, he pre- 

 pared the eleventh volume in 1886, the fourteenth in 1888, 

 the fifteenth in 1890, and half of the nineteenth in 1891. 



When the ' Challenger ' Expedition started to go round 

 the world in 1873, at the request of his friend, the late Sir 

 Wyville Thomson, he agreed to work out all the birds. 

 Soon after the return of the ex{)e(lition in 1877 the speci- 

 mens collected were ])laced in his hands, and with the 

 assistance of his ornithological friends were speedily reported 

 upon in a series of papers contributed to the Zoological 

 Society's ' Proceedings.' The whole of these papers were 

 reprinted with additions and illustrations, and now form 

 part of the second volume of the " Zoology " of the 

 ' Challenger ' Expedition. 



Geography, being very closely connected with zoology, 



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