The Birds of Cuba Memoirs of the Nuttall Ornithological Club, No. VI.

Cambridge, Massachusetts: Nuttall Ornithological Club. Very Good+. 1923. First Edition; First Printing. Hardcover. Autograph; 141 pp. pages; Publisher's dark green cloth, spine lettered in gilt. Very nice condition, with spine ends and corners showing just a touch of light rubbing. Gravure frontispiece with original tissue guard intact -- three additional prints, as issued. A scarce presentation copy, INSCRIBED in ink on the upper corner of the front free endpaper" "To James Greenway / from his friend / [SIGNED] Thomas Barbour" This undated, but early, inscription is highly significant as a memorial from a longtime Director of Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology to a successor as Curator of Birds at the MCZ -- James Cowan Greenway (1903 – 1989). In youth, Thomas Barbour visited Harvard around the turn of the century where he was profoundly impressed by the Museum of Comparative Zoology. He became a Harvard figure for most of the rest of his life, including a passage through the University's degrees as an undergraduate, Masters, and PhD. Barbour became Director of the MCZ in 1927 and remained in that important position at the time of his death in 1946. Although he traveled widely throughout the world as a naturalist, Cuba was particularly important to him. In a popular book he published in the last full year of his life, 'Naturalist in Cuba,' Barbour writes, "I suspect that I am the only living American naturalist who has visited all parts of the island again and again, for I am not only a Cuban by adoption, but a devoted friend of the land and its people." Associated with being the director of the MCZ, Barbour had an official position which helped reinforce his long involvement in Cuba -- he was superintendant of the Harvard Botanical Gardens located in Soledad -- now known as the Jardin Botanico de Cienfuegos. In contrast, the recipient of our book, James Greenway, was a Yale man [1926] -- where his father James Greenway Sr., had been the founder of the Yale School of Public Health. James Greenway Jr.'s parents' marriage brought together two branches of the "Lauder-Greenway" family (descendents of the business partner of Andrew Carnegie). After leaving the world of the academic Naturalists for what must have been a particularly interesting service in Naval Intelligence in the Pacific Theater of WWII, Greenway returned to the MCZ. He only left that institution and Cambridge in 1960. After that date, most of his career as an ornithologist centers around the American Museum of Natural History. A colleague at the AMNH, Francois Vuilleumier -- (who became Chairman of the AMNH Department of Ornithology, and thus, arguably, Greenway's boss) -- wrote a postumous note about the recipient of our book: "Jim Greenway was a profoundly eccentric man who was probably unable to tolerate others with a lesser streak of eccentricity than he had. He should be remembered especially as the person who was in charge of the very rich MCZ bird collection for many years, who helped avian conservation get a solid start, who wrote the classic Extinct and Vanishing Birds of the World, who helped publish Peters' Check-list after Peters' death, and who assisted the Department of Ornithology at AMNH in many unrecorded but important ways." [in "The Auk" 109, (2)]. The first listed of these accompishments, a book first published in 1958, will likely be remembered as long as observers look for and at birds (and wonder why there are fewer in the skys that once had been the case). ; Signed by Author .