THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL ORNITHOLOGICAL CONGRESS, I88t. 59 
bird-protection was treated in the presence and with the 
assistance of several leading ornithologists (V. supra). 
We know, further, that this Congress agreed on seven 
points and that of these points No. 2 ordered the compilation 
of a list of birds to be protected, while § 5 arranged for the 
same to done with the noxious birds, i. e. just exactly what 
BALDAiMUS saw to be necessary as far back as 1856, includ- 
ing it in his first draft. These two lists would have offered a 
solid basis for an endorsement later on of the international 
convention. 
But, in the mean time, the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Ministry 
came to an agreement with Italy, which resulted in the 
„Declaration" of 1875 and the protocol attached; the lists of 
useful and noxious birds, however, were omitted; and this 
was the cause of the vacillation shown by the various States, 
which were only informed that „ useful birds were to be 
protected, the noxious ones to be hunted down." The question 
as to which species were to be protected or hunted down 
found no answer either in the Declaration or in the protocol. 
Yet that was the point on which everything hinged. 
To take up the thread of events again: time passed 
in barren negotiations without even any such result being 
attained as, in other circumstances, the renewal of Switzer- 
land's proposal that an international conference should be 
assembled must have produced. 
The First International Ornithological Congress, 1884. 
Then occurred the event of 1884, the First International 
Ornithological Congress summoned to Vienna, that promised 
to be of importance or even decisive in the matter of bird- 
protection. This Congress figures in the list of Ornithological 
Congresses since held as „the most brilliant," a fact that is 
