"This brilliant day, the auspicious beginning of the year 1920, moves me to write 

 to you something of what has been in my mind for many moons in regard to the 

 Museum of Comparative Oology. 



"Your first letter to me some years ago announcing its conception aroused a good 

 deal of interest on my part and a little cogitating made me realize what a unique posi- 

 tion such a museum would occupy. Nests and eggs have always been of the greatest 

 interest to me, much more so than skins; and the ideas which rose in my mind as I 

 contemplated your" proposal made me realize the possibilities which lay before your 

 project. Later, your published statements of your plans and purposes gave these ideas 

 a more concrete form and a better conception of the work to be done. 



"Permit me at this time to write these few words of appreciation and encourage- 

 ment, bespeaking the support of all oologists, in the east as well as in the west. 

 May I also add a prophetic word forecasting an accelerated growth of the Museum 

 of Comparative Oology. It is already an institution of which all of us are proud, 

 particularly those who have helped a bit. The western collectors are lifting bravely. 

 May more of us in the east lend a hand and live to be proud of doing so." 



— Frank C. Willard, Farmingdale. L. I. (Letter, January 1, 1920.) 



"We must very heartily congratulate our brother ornithologists of Santa Barbara, 

 California, on their enterprise in starting a Museum with its attending Journal on 

 Oology, a science which has been grievously neglected though collectors of eggs are so 

 numerous. We wish the Museum and Journal the greatest success, and recommend 

 the latter to all oologists for careful stud}'." 



■ — Review in the Ibis, official journal of the British Ornithologists Union, July, 1919. 



AN OOLOGICAL REVISION OF THE ALCIFORMES. 

 By William Leon Dawson. 



Although a lifelong student of birds, the writer does not profess to be deeply 

 versed in the lore of taxonomy. The tomes of comparative anatomy, if not exactly 

 sealed books to him, are scanned with a reverent (but not too reverent) eye. He 

 does not belong, on the other hand, to the school of "speciation specialists." It has 

 never been his privilege to describe a new species of birds, nor even a new subspecies. 

 This, truth to tell, not from any lack of opportunity, but rather from impatience, or 

 an inhibiting sense of humor. There will be burdens enough borne by trinomial 

 nomenclature, God knows, without the inflictions of one more aspirant. 



These disqualifications are confessed at the outset in order to claim indulgence 

 for ignorance of many technical treatises and reviews of classification, as well as to 

 justify, if justification is possible, a position of detached criticism. While the methods 

 of the anatomist are not altogether familiar to me, his confident claims are familiar 

 enough. Taxonomists, I see, are all too easily satisfied with incomplete, or superficial 

 evidence; and the "speciation specialists" are content to refine and polish the surface 

 of the taxonomic structure, without concerning themselves as to the remodeling of the 

 structure itself. 



As an outside critic, then, it seems to me that the taxonomic architects and their 

 subcontractor-builders, whether osteologists, splanchnologists, pterylographists or 

 metric clerks, have overlooked an important line of evidence in trying to determine 

 what shall go where. For, it goes without saying, the taxonomist's task is to recon- 

 struct the course of biological history. He is seeking not alone a formally ordered, or 

 traditional body, of knowledge, but an understanding of the actual facts. If he is 

 honest, he is not constructing some ideal filing system; but he is reconstructing the 

 outline of the tree of life. He is trying to discover phylogenetic relationships, that is, 

 the relationship of nature, the blood relations of father and son, or mother and daugh- 

 ter, and so on to the remotest ramification of the living. 



Given two birds, therefore, the taxonomist scrutinizes them in every aspect with 

 the chief purpose of determining the degree of their relationship. It is not enough 

 for his purpose to say that the birds are of the same color, or of the same size, or 

 of the same texture of plumage, or even of a fairly similar bony structure. I use the 

 last-named term very carefully, for experience has shown us that identity of bony 

 structure, at least identify within our ability to distinguish, indicates specific, or at 

 least generic resemblance in the birds compared. But the deep-seated, conclusive 

 characters, by reason of their very immobility, are of an indeterminable venerable- 

 ness. We cannot write history in the terms of the established alone. Even where 

 the bony structures of birds are bafflingly similar, there may be other outstanding 

 characters of divergence which place the birds more or less apart in the phylogenetic 



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