40 



AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOTES. 



intimately associated. Although unable to attend the meeting of ornitholo- 

 gists at which the Union was founded it happened that I was selected as its 

 first president, and, contrary to my expressed wish, was annually reelected 

 for the following six years. This embraced of course the formative period 

 of the society's history, when its work was planned and carried forward with 

 the energy and enthusiasm that so strongly marked its early activities. 

 Committees were appointed at its first meeting to take in hand various 

 important subjects, as the migration and geographic distribution of North 

 American birds, which investigation was prosecuted so successfully that 

 in a few years it outgrew the financial resources of the society and led to the 

 establishing of a Division of the United States Department of Agriculture to 

 carry on the work, which ultimately became the present Bureau of Biological 

 Survey, for many years under the direction of C. Hart Merriam, the chair- 

 man of this committee of the American Ornithologists' Union. 



Another important committee was at the same time established to 

 prepare a standard Check-List of North American birds, to displace the 

 discordant check-lists then in vogue, with of course undesirable results. 

 To accomplish this it was found necessary at the outset to have as the basis 

 of the list a consistent and carefully prepared code of rules of nomenclature 

 in place of then existing inharmonious codes and go-as-you-please methods 

 of nomenclature. This led to intense research on the part of several mem- 

 bers of the committee, and eventually to the adoption and publication of a 

 new code, departing widely in some important respects from any of its 

 predecessors. This A. O. U. Code later became the basis of the International 

 Code of Zoological Nomenclature, framed on essentially the same lines and 

 departing from it in no essential respect, except in point of brevity, through 

 omission of adequate illustrations of the rules, and thereby rendering 

 necessary the issuance of official 'Opinions' to clear up obscure points. A 

 draft of the A. O. U. Code was made by two members of its Nomenclature 

 Committee, to serve as a working basis for the Committee, which after 

 long and careful consideration by the full Committee was adopted essen- 

 tially as written, not only as to form and phraseology but also (with the 

 exception of the addition of a single provision, since abandoned) as to its 

 rulings. 1 



The work of the A. O. U. Nomenclature Committee resulted not only 

 in a new check-list of North American birds, standardizing their nomen- 

 clature, but also a new and elaborate Code of Zoological Nomenclature, 



1 It may be pardonable in this connection to state that the preliminary draft was written in part 

 by Elliott Coues (mainly the part comprising the ' General Principles ') and the rest, including the his- 

 torical part of the 'Introduction' and most of the 'Canons' and their explanatory ' remarks ', by the 

 author of these 'Notes.' 



