The next four volumes of the Catalogue will be devoted to the Picariæ, and are said to be all in a more or less forward state. That on the Woodpeckers, by Mr. Hargitt, will, we believe, be issued very shortly. Our Honorary Member, Count T. Salvadori, has undertaken the volume on the Parrots (which, we suppose, will be the twentieth), and he will be resident in London during the autumn for the purpose of preparing it. New Bird-books in preparation. Mr. Dresser is preparing a supplementary volume to his Birds of Europe,' and has, we believe, nearly 100 species to add to his former work. Mr. Sharpe has made arrangements with Messrs. Sotheran and Co. to publish a Monograph of the Paradise-birds, for which, we understand, the plates contained in the Birds of New Guinea' will be utilized, as far as they are available. Mr. Seebohm is now engaged in passing through the press a work on the Birds of Japan, and has, besides, a Monograph of the Thrushes, with coloured figures of all the species, in preparation. Pelagodroma marina in the Canaries.-Mr. Bartlett, during his recent visit to the Canaries, picked up a specimen of Pelagodroma marina dead on the sea-shore near Las Palmas, on the 26th February. Its occurrence in the Canaries has already been noted by several observers (cf. S. G. Reid, Ibis, 1888, p. 81; Tristram, Ibis, 1889, p. 14; Meade-Waldo, Ibis, 1889, p. 517); and it probably breeds on some of the adjoining islets, but few specimens of this Petrel have yet been obtained in this locality. Concerning its synonymy, cf. Salvin, in Rowley's Orn. Misc. i. p. 228. Anniversary Meeting of the British Ornithologists' Union. 1890.-The Annual General Meeting of the British Ornithologists' Union was held at the rooms of the Zoological Society, 3 Hanover Square, on Wednesday, the 21st May, at 6 P.M., Mr. P. L. SCLATER, M.A., Ph.D., F.R.S., in the Chair. The Minutes of the last Meeting having been read and confirmed, the Committee presented their Report, in which it was stated that, in accordance with the resolution passed at the General Meeting of the Union in 1889, the vacant Secretaryship had been filled up by the appointment of Mr. F. Du Cane Godman, F.R.S., to that office. The accounts presented showed the position of the Union at the close of the year 1889. The cost of the volume for that year had been somewhat in excess of the previous This had been mainly caused by its greater size and by the larger number of plates. Moreover, it contained an Index of Contents, occupying 8 pages, which was a new feature in the annual volume. one. Since the last Annual Meeting, as the Committee regretted to have to remind the Members, a great loss had been suffered by the death of Mr. John Henry Gurney, one of the original Members of the Union. Mr. Gurney was a most active and zealous ornithologist, and had been a constant contributor to and liberal supporter of The Ibis' since its foundation. The Union had also to regret the death of Mr. John Marshall, of Taunton, who was elected a Member in 1885. Lord Clifton had resigned his Membership, and another Member had been removed under the rules, for non-payment of his subscription. Notwithstanding these losses, the number of Members continued to increase, and there were at present on the list the names of 194 Ordinary, 1 Extraordinary, 8 Honorary, and 19 Foreign Members, making a total of 222. The following Ordinary Members were then balloted for and declared duly elected : : Frank Barclay, Knott's Green, Leyton. Harry Brinsley Brooke, 33 Egerton Gardens, Kensington. Charles Cave, Ditcham Park, Petersfield. James A. G. Drummond-Hay, Coldstream Guards, Guards' Club, Pall Mall. Lionel Fisher, Kandy, Ceylon. William R. Ogilvie Grant, 6 Stanhope Place, Hyde Joshua Reynolds Gascoign Gwatkin, Manor House, Henry Charles Vicars Hunter, 7 Bury Street, St. James's, Thomas James Monk, St. Anne's, Lewes, Sussex. Albert Irving Muntz, Umberslade, Birmingham, and C. M. Hayes Newington (Major, King's Regt.), Lee, John Tristram Tristram-Valentine, 1 Sheffield Gardens, Stephen Venour, Fern Bank, Altrincham, Cheshire. The following Honorary Members were also elected :— The following Foreign Members were also elected :- Dr. Emin Pacha, Bagamoyo, East Africa. Joel Asaph Allen, American Museum Natural History, The former President and Secretary were then re-elected, and Mr. R. Bowdler Sharpe was elected into the Committee in the place of Mr. E. Bidwell, who retired by rotation. The Officers for the year 1890-1891 will therefore be as follows: : President. THE RIGHT HON. LORD LILFORD. Secretary. F. D. GODMAN, Esq., F.R.S. Editor. P. L. SCLATER, ESQ. Committee. O. SALVIN, ESQ. HOWARD SAUNDERS, ESQ. R. BOWDLER SHARPE, ESQ. After a vote of thanks to the Chairman the Meeting adjourned. The Annual Dinner, subsequently held at the Café Royal, was attended by thirty-two Members and guests. Obituary. Mr. J. H. GURNEY.-By the death of Mr. JOHN HENRY GURNEY, on the 20th of April last, not only does the British Ornithologists' Union lose another of its founders, but 'The Ibis' one of its most constant and munificent supporters. Our deceased Member, the only son of Joseph John Gurney, of Earlham in the county of Norfolk (celebrated for the various philanthropic undertakings to which he devoted the leisure of his life), was born on the 4th of July, 1819, and at the age of about ten years was sent to a private tutor, who lived in Epping Forest. Thence he went to the Friends' School at Tottenham, and on leaving it, being then about seventeen years old, entered the banking business at Norwich, in which his family had long been so successfully engaged. His love of natural history showed itself very early, and the writer of these lines was told by him of his getting into a serious scrape at school by dissecting a bird on a mahogany desk, which immediately afterwards revealed the secret of the use to which it had been put as an operating table, by the stains on its polished surface from the camphorated spirit (supplied to the boys as a cure for colds, and the only antiseptic liquid available) that he had employed to avert the possibility of unpleasant odours from his "subject." During his school-days in Essex he made the acquaintance of Mr. Henry Doubleday, of Epping, so long known for his ornithological and entomological collections, and from him obtained, in 1836, an introduction to the equally well known Mr. T. C. Heysham, of Carlisle, with whom he kept up for many years a correspondence, chiefly on zoological matters sending him from time to time birds, mostly obtained in Norfolk; for at this time Gurney had not begun a collection of his own. That his generosity was then as great as it continued in after years is shown by his letters to Heysham, which have fortunately been preserved, and have been kindly placed at the service of the writer of this notice by their present custodian, Mr. H. A. Macpherson, giving almost the only information to be obtained as to this period of GURNEY'S life. They will compare well with those written by any other youthful zoologist. Zeal is of course to be expected in a greater or less degree, and here it is found to be in the former; but it seems to be in all cases tempered by a sober judgment; and, if a partiality be observable towards whatever relates to the zoology, and especially the ornithology, of Norfolk, it must be remembered that this was the subject on which the writer undertook to inform his correspondent, while as the correspondence advances, what may be called its breadth of view decidedly increases. Moreover, it seems to be strictly according to the fitness of things that a young naturalist should begin by paying attention to the objects which, being the nearest to him, come the more closely under his observation, for thus he is able to proceed from the known to the unknown-the surest mode of acquiring knowledge. There have been possibly few men who could, at the age of nineteen, write as GURNEY did to Heysham on the 8th of February, 1838 "Though I can seldom or never resist the temptation of procuring a tolerable bird in the flesh, when opportunity occurs, I care very little for them after I have once learnt them by heart, as I contrive to preserve them almost as well in my memory as I could hope to do in my cabinet. I therefore generally palm their remains off on some of my friends; because, though I know that in themselves they often are worthless, yet I always fancy that there is some interest in comparing specimens of the same bird from different localities." This last must have been an original observation, as it was made before the question of the local variation of species had 2 F SER. VI.-VOL. II. |