1917.] Chapman, Disiribidion of Bird-life in Colombia. 11 



My assistant, Mr. Waldron DeWitt Miller has given me the benefit 

 of his advice in many knotty problems, and to Mr. David S. Ball and Mrs. 

 Alice K. Fraser, of the Department of Birds, I am also under many obliga- 

 tions. Mr. Ball made the preliminary identifications of the Hummingbirds, 

 while to Mrs. Fraser has fallen the clerical labor, comparison of refer- 

 ences, proof-reading, indexing, etc., incident to the preparation of a report 

 of this kind. 



Additional assistance of a more specific nature is acknowledged in con- 

 nection with the instance in which it has been given. 



A REVIEW OF COLOMBIAN ORNITHOLOGY. 



' Bogotd' Collections. — Eighty years had passed since the pubhcation 

 of the tenth edition of Linnseus' 'Systema Natura' before naturalists began 

 to draw on the ornithological treasures of Colombia which, after eighty 

 years more, are still unexhausted. It was apparently in 1838 or 1839 that 

 a French collector, resident in Bogota, began to send birds' skins to Paris. 

 These came to the attention of Boissoneau, Lafresnaye, Des Murs and 

 Bourcier, who described many of them as new in the pages of the 'Revue 

 Zoologique' and 'Revue et Magazin.' Native collectors soon learned how 

 to prepare skins which, in increasing numbers, were sent to Paris, and, 

 apparently as early as 1840, reached London, since Fraser described several 

 new 'Bogota' birds in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society for 1840. 

 So large were the shipments of birds from Bogota that in 1855 Sclater, 

 from whose paper we learn these facts, published in the Proceedings of the 

 Zoological Society, a list of 435 species personally known to him from the 

 Bogota region. Many of these were species of wide distribution, others 

 were migrants from North America, but of the remainder no less than 180 

 had been described from "New Grenada,'' as the country was then called, 

 chiefly from the Bogota region, and of these some seventy were first made 

 known by Lafresnaye. In. 1857 (P. Z. S., pp. 15-20) Sclater pubhshed an 

 addendum which added 52 species to his previous list making 487 which at 

 that time were known from the Bogota region. 



Since that date hundreds of thousands, possibly even millions, of birds, 

 collected primarily for millinery purposes, have been shipped from Bogota, 

 in the main to London and Paris. This trade probably reached its maxi- 

 mum about 1885, when the fashion of wearing small birds on hats was 

 at its height, but with a change in style which created a demand for the 



