Obituary. 357 
from all parts of the globe, a record of the proceedings 
being subsequently printed in the c Bulletin ’ of the Club. 
Although Dr. Sharpe had not much leisure for foreign 
travel beyond an occasional trip to Paris or Berlin, or an 
autumn holiday in Norway, his official position once enabled 
him to undertake a notable journey to India for the purpose 
of superintending the package and transport of a valuable 
collection of birds and mammals which (on the condition of 
his taking charge of it) had been presented to the British 
Museum by Mr. A. O. Hume, of Simla. Accordingly Sharpe 
went out to arrange for its safe dispatch to London, a 
matter of no slight difficulty, seeing that it contained 
no less than 63,000 birds, 18,500 eggs, and 500 mammals. 
This incident recalls the fact that in several other instances 
the Nation has been indebted to Dr. Sharpe for mo&t valuable 
collections presented to the Museum more or less through 
his instrumentality. To quote from his address as President 
of the Fourth International Ornithological Congress, held in 
London in June 1905, the following lines will shew how 
enormously the collections under his charge at the Museum 
were increased during his term of office: “ It has been up 
to the present time (1905) impossible to prepare an exact 
estimate of the number of birds and eggs in the British 
Museum ... At the lowest computation the specimens 
must number 400,000, and at the time when I assumed 
office in 1872 a liberal estimate of the collection of birds 
and eggs would be 35,000: it probably did not exceed 
30,000.” 
The services thus rendered to science by Dr. Sharpe, in 
the care of and enormous increase to the collections under 
his charge, in the valuable Catalogue of Birds already referred 
to, besides a subsequent 1 Hand-list of Birds ’ in five volumes, 
and in the numerous monographs and papers of importance 
which were independently published by him, are such as 
have never been achieved by one man in his lifetime, and in 
the opinion of his fellow workers, who are best qualified to 
express their views on the subject, some adequate recognition 
of such services by the Treasury on the recommendation of 
