July, 1919 AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 167 
and Ernest Ingersoll, they joined us around the cozy winter fire in Brewster’s 
house, and many pleasant and profitable evenings were thus spent. Soon oth- 
ers expressed a desire to join the little circle, and from this small beginning was 
born in due time the Nuttall Ornithological Club. The first issue of its bulle- 
tin appeared in 1876, with J. A. Allen and Elliott Coues as assistant editors. 
The choice of a name for the club was a happy one, for, although Thomas 
Nuttall was much more of a botanist than an ornithologist, he lived for a de- 
cade in Cambridge, wrote his ‘‘Manual of the Ornithology of the United States 
andeCanada’’ there, and doubtless many of the original observations recorded 
in it were made in the Cambridge region.’ 
THE AMERICAN ORNITHOLOGISTS’ UNION, BIOLOGICAL SURVEY, AND NATIONAL 
AUDUBON SOCIETY 
Perhaps it is not too much to say that as a natural sequence of the forma- 
tion of the Nuttall Club and the publication of its bulletin there sprung into ex- 
istence in the fullness of time, the American Ornithologists’ Union, founded 
September 26, 1883, and its journal ‘‘The Auk’’ which has had more potent in- 
fluence in shaping the trend of American Ornithology than all other agencies 
combined. is iud> tel 
Still another important consequence followed in the wake of the N. O. C., 
though in nowise directly connected with it. At the first meeting of the Union 
one of the committees appointed was ‘‘On the Status of the English Sparrow’, 
and in 1885, Congress made a small appropriation to carry on the investigation 
in connection with the Agricultural Department. This was the beginning of 
the ‘‘ Division of Economic Ornithology’’ which later, under the able manage- 
ment of Doctor C. Hart Merriam, grew into the Bureau of Biological Survey. 
The first meeting of the Union was pregnant with still further important 
consequences. The Committee on the Protection of North American Birds then 
appointed did yeoman’s service for several years, and then, largely due to the 
enthusiasm and leadership of Wiliam Dutcher, grew into the National Associa- 
tion of Audubon Societies which, with its Model Bird Law, has exerted a very 
powerful influence in this country for the protection of Citizen Bird. 
MEETING WITH W. E. D. SCOTT 
In the fall of 1870 I was collecting birds one day on the Cooledge Farm, 
back of Mount Auburn—a locality no doubt familiar to Nuttall in his day and 
for several years a favorite collecting ground of Brewster and myself—when I 
heard the report of a collecting gun, and investigation soon revealed a young 
fellow slowly limping his way through the trees, gun in one hand and eane in 
the other. Accosting him, I found he was W. E. D. Scott, then taking a scienti- 
fie course at Harvard. He came to be an excellent naturalist and a successful 
and indefatigable bird collector despite his disability, which would have proved 
an insuperable obstacle to anyone not possessed of more than ordinary courage 
and enthusiasm. Later he became one of the founders of the Nuttall Ornitho- 
logical Club. 
, MEET ISAAC SPRAGUE 
In the fall of 1870 my father moved to Grantville, now Wellesley Hills, 
the region around which proved to be very inviting to the lover of outdoor life. 
Soon after, I made the acquaintance of Isaac Sprague, then living on the out- 
skirts of the town, who not only had known Audubon when a young man but 
had accompanied him on his Missouri River trip in 1843 to aid the veteran or- 
os For an interesting account of Nuttall and his activities the reader is referred to 
William Brewster’s “Birds of the Cambridge Region of Massachusetts, 1906”. 
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