6 NOVITATES ZoOtOOlOAJ! XXV. 1918. 



the knowledge and experience of A. E. Brehm. Probably it was done because 

 it was feared that the great number of nearly 15,000 birds would be more diffi- 

 cult to sell than the (about) 7,000 selected skins. I have elsewhere (Novitates 

 ZooLOGiCAE, 1901, p. 39) explained that the sale was never realised during 

 Alfred's life-time, that many specimens had been destroyed and suffered, and 

 that many more would have disappeared in time, unless Kleinschmidt and I 

 had become interested in the collection and unless the present Lord Rothschild 

 had bought the whole collection and placed it in safety in the Tring Museum, 

 where it is now accessible to the scientific world. Fortunately the last busy- 

 body who began to write new labels in place of the old ones did not get very 

 far, and has thus not done any appreciable harm. 



Besides the bulk of the collection which was made by C. L. Brehm himself 

 — as I have said above, over a period of fifty-six years — the Brehm Collection 

 contains the bulk (though not aU) of the beautiful and valuable collections 

 brought together by his sons, Alfred Edmund and Oscar (the latter of whom 

 was drowned in the Nile), in Egypt, Nubia, and Sennaar, by A. E. Brehm in 

 Spain 1856, and in Norway 1860, all beautifully prepared and well labelled, as 

 good now as they were over half a century ago. Many specimens were received 

 in exchange from Graf Wodzicki in Galicia, A. Lindermayer in Greece, from 

 E. von Homeyer in Pommerania, Zander in Mecklenburg, F. W. J. Badeker in 

 Witten, Landbeck, Boie, von Hueber in Klagenfurth, Petenyi in Hungary, 

 Oberlander in Greiz, Bock, and other German ornithologists of" olden days. 

 There are hundreds of skins from Sandersleben in Dessau, all well-prepared and 

 carefully labelled. For a long time I had no idea who had collected them, but 

 from comparison of the writing with that of skins collected on the Nile by Oscar 

 Brehm, I have come to the conclusion that they must undoubtedly have been 

 collected by the unfortunate Oscar. A great number of skins came from Leon 

 Olphe-Galliard, partly from Western Switzerland (Canton Freiburg), partly from 

 the neighbourhood of Lyon. Unfortunately, Brehm did not, as a rule, mark 

 the collector's name on the label ; but in the majority of cases I have been able 

 to make it out and put it on the new labels. 



It is almost incredible how slovenly and incompletely Brehm' s works have 

 been quoted in literature. Every one of his books has been known to most 

 compilers of synonymic lists, but none of them has been quoted completely with, 

 perhaps, the exception of one, viz. the Handb. der Naturg. aller Vogel Deutschl., 

 1831, and even there some of the new names given in the Nachtrdge, pp. 1006- 

 1022", have been overlooked. I, too, have been guilty of often trusting to the 

 completeness of existing lists, until I found that some names which I had accepted 

 from 1831, or as nomina nuda of 1866, were fully described in 1822, 1824, etc. 

 Dr. Richmond of the U.S. National Museum also called my attention to some 

 names of which I had, in common with other ornithologists, overlooked the 

 first descriptions. I have, therefore, now gone through all the volumes of the 

 Isis, the badly neglected Beitrdge zur Vogelkunde (1820-1822), the equally 

 slighted Lehrbuch der Natvrg. aller eur. Vogel (1823 and 1824), t]ie Handb. fiir den 

 Liebhaber der 8tuben-u. Hausvogel (1832), the Allg. d. Naturh.Zeitung, and other 

 books, and I hope that no names remain overlooked, though this is by no means 

 impossible, as Brehm' s names are scattered over so many places, and he hardly 

 ever quoted his former descriptions in his writings. 



In the following list of the " types " I follow, for the sake of convenience 



