Page:Bird-lore Vol 01.djvu/231

 == A BI-MONTHLY MAGAZINE

DEVOTED TO THE STUDY AND PROTECTION OF BIRDS

Elliott Coues
ITH extreme regret we learn of the death of Dr. Elliott Coues, at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, on Christmas Day, after a grave operation performed December 6. Dr. Coues died in the harness, as a more or less direct result from overwork, after a life of such phenomenal activity in the fields of science and literature that we have space for little more than an outline of his career.

Elliott Coues was born at Portsmouth, N. H., on September g, 1842. In 1853 his family moved to Washington, D. C., where he was educated at the Jesuit Seminary and Columbian University, graduating from the latter in 1861 as A. B., and in 1863 as M.D. In this year he was appointed assistant surgeon in the United States Army and ordered to irizona. After ten years' service at various posts he accepted, in 1873, the position of surgeon and naturalist of the United States Northern Boundary Survey from the Lake of the Woods to the Rocky mountains. After two years' field work he returned to Washington to prepare his report, on the completion of which, in 1876, he was made secretary and naturalist to the United States Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories, a position he held for the ensuing four years, the period of his greatest scientific activity. In 1877 he was elected to fill the Chair of Anatomy in the National Medical College in Washington, a professorship he held for ten years.

In 1880 Dr. Coues was ordered to the western frontier, but he had become so deeply engaged in scientific work that he resigned from the army and returned to Washington, where he resided for the remainder of his life. Doctor Coues' first contribution to ornithology was ' A Monograph of the Tringeae of North America,' a paper of thirty-five pages, published in the proceedings of the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences for