J» A • ' A • 
AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY 
77th Street and Central Park West 
New York October 29 , 1909. 
DEPARTMENT OF 
MAMMALOGY AND ORNITHOLOGY 
Dear Mr. Brewster 
Your letter of the 26th Is received. You are 
apparently under misapprehension as to the present status of the 
new Check-List. Replies have teen received from all the members 
of the Committee except yourself to my circular letter of October 
23, and the vote is practically unanimous on all except one; name¬ 
ly, the Black Duck case, where the vote is so much divided it will 
be best to leave this in abeyance for future settlement. Dr. Mer- 
riam and Mr. Ridgway prefer not to vote on two or three questions, 
but otherwise the vote was affirmative on all the points presented 
in the letter. There hence appears to be no very good reason for 
delaying the composition until the A. 0. IT. meeting. I shall, of 
course, call a meeting of the Committee for that date, when any re¬ 
maining unsettled matters can be considered. Ho part of the Check¬ 
list is to be printed until the whole is in type, hence, should 
changes be necessary in the early part they can be made just before 
the work is 0. K’d. for press, which I hope will be early in 1910. 
My last letter to the Committee respecting the purchase of 
type carrying the accents has opened that question again, and, as 
yet no one has responded to that letter; perhaps because the five 
members favoring the use of the accents had already given authority 
for their purchase, which may he taken as settling the question 
