VOL. vn.] THE LATE P. L. SCLATER. 67 



give a full list of his innumerable papers or even larger 

 works, for which the reader must be referred to Bulletin 

 No. 49 of the United States National Museum ; shorter 

 details wiU be found in the Jubilee Volume of The Ibis, 

 and in the forthcoming number of that periodical. He 

 was always a keen observer of British birds, both at 

 his home in Hampshire and elsewhere, and a warm 

 supporter of any project for their preservation. 



Sclater's greatest claim to the gratitude of posterity 

 will by many be considered his work on Geographical 

 Distribution and Classification. As early as 1858 he began 

 to consider the first of these subjects, and before long 

 formulated his views, suggesting the division of the 

 world (from ornithological considerations) into the six 

 regions now very generally accepted : Palsearctic, 

 Ethiopian, Indian, Austrahan, Nearctic and Neotropical. 

 Later he wrote, with his son William, on the geographical 

 distribution of mammals, while in 1880 he propounded 

 a Classification of the Class " Aves " in the pages of 

 The Ibis. 



Sclater was born at Tangier Park in Hampshire, in 

 November, 1829, and belonged to the old county family 

 now represented by his nephew. Lord Basing ; he was 

 educated at Winchester and Oxford, where he was a 

 Scholar of Corpus Christi College and took a first class 

 in Mathematics. At Oxford he made the acquaintance 

 of Strickland and Gould, but after obtaining his fellowship 

 he soon left for a prolonged tour in America and Canada, 

 including the backwoods from Lake Superior to the 

 Mississippi. He met on this occasion the great New 

 World Ornithologists, Cassin, Baird, and Lawrence, while 

 previously in France he had become a great friend of 

 Prince Charles Bonaparte. Visits to North and South 

 Africa and the Continent generally took place later 

 in his fife. In 1860 Sclater received the honorary 

 degree of Doctor of Philosophy from the University of 

 Bonn and in 1901 was made a Doctor of Science by 

 the University of Oxford. He was one of the General 



