Catalogue of a collection of American Birds belonging to Philip Lutley Sclater by SCLATER, Philip Lutley (1829-1913) - 1862

London: N. Trubner & Co, 1862. 8vo. Letterpress title with ornithological wood-engraved vignette by Pearson. 20 hand-coloured lithographed plates by and after John Jennens, printed by M. & N. Hanhart. Some plates trimmed. Modern calf backed marbled paper boards First edition and apparently very rare: "Only 100 copies of the perfect work have been prepared" (note by Trubner & Co. on the wrappers of "The Ibis" for July and October 1862), and Wood and Zimmer record that only 100 copies with plates were published. This is Philip Sclater's catalogue of his personal collection, which was housed in ten small cabinets cross-referenced to the present work: "I began to form a collection of bird-skins after I commenced my residence in Oxford in 1848, being induced to do so by the advice of ... H.E. Strickland. ... My collection at present consists of about 4100 specimens, representing 2170 species of American birds of the Orders Passeres, Fissirostres and Scansores. Of these 386 are type-specimens, being those from which the original descriptions of the species have been taken. In conclusion, I may add that, in selecting specimens for this collection, one of my great objects has been to illustrate the geographical distribution of the species" (Preface). It was this interest in the geographic distribution of birds that led to Sclater proposing zoogeographic regions that are still in use today. Subsequently, Sclater's collection of bird skins were transferred to the British Museum [now the Natural History Museum], beginning in 1886. At around the same time the museum was augmented by the collections of Gould, Salvin and Godman, Hume, and others to become the largest in the world. Sclater was "the founder and editor of The Ibis, the journal of the British Ornithologists' Union, and secretary of the Zoological Society of London from 1860 to 1903. His interest in natural history spread beyond the bounds of the bird family, but some of the birds named after Sclater include: dusky-billed parrotlet (now changed from Forpus sclateri to Forpus modestus); Sclater's monal (Lopophorus sclateri); erect-crested penguin (Eudyptes sclateri); Ecuadorian cacique (Cacicus sclateri); Mexican chickadee (Poecile sclateri) and the bay-vented Cotinga (Doliornis sclateri). Anker 449; Fine Bird Books (1990) p.139 "only 100 copies issued"; Goode Published writings of Philip Lutley Sclater (1896) 8; Nissen IVB 837; Wood p. 557; Zimmer p. 559 (quoting Trubner).