Coues’s Compliments of the Season. 
5 
1883.] 
/ 
Langille of Buffalo had completed a work upon New York 
Birds ; and that the new “Avifauna Columbiana,” to be published 
with illustrations under the auspices of the Biological Society of 
Washington, had gone to press. This was cool, considering 
that Dr. D. W. Prentiss and ourselves were the authors of the 
work, as we informed him, and accepted his apology. In fact 
the only graceful things the saucy gossip had to say were respect- 
ing the “Nests and Eggs of the Birds of Ohio,” which work he 
hoped would meet with all the success it so well deserved. 
Our little visitors 
seemed in some 
hurry to be off 
when our next cal- 
ler was announced. 
Surnia was polite 
and dignified, as 
usual. He had 
heard, he said, that 
we were about to 
publish a new edi- 
of the “Key,” 
which he trusted 
would be much 
more handsomely 
illustrated than the 
former one, and, as 
his own contribu- 
tion to that end, 
offered us a strik- 
ing likeness of 
himself. He re- 
marked with grim humor that as the plan of the work included 
a treatise on the anatomy of birds, he was at our service for afty 
dissections we might wish made. But this being rather a deli- 
cate subject, the conversation turned upon late catalogues and 
nomenclators of North American Birds. Surnia complained with 
some warmth, that, like the old woman in Mother Goose, he 
hardly knew whether he was himself or somebody else. He 
begged to suggest the propriety of calling a Congress of American 
Ornithologists to discuss, vote upon, and decide each case in which 
