May, 1919 115 'MALCOLM PLAYF,?IR ANDERSON By MELVILLE B. ANDERSON WITH PORTRAIT HE SUBJECT of this sketch, and the son of its author, was born at Irving- ton, a suburb of Indianapolis, April 6, 1879. His parents were both of school and college training, his father being at that time a professor at Butler College. From his twelfth to his fourteenth year Malcolm was at school in Germany, where 'he 'went ?wi?h his mother, his elder brother, and the two younger children of the family. Here he learned little from books, but his con- tact with the German schoolboy was perhaps of some educative value. He and his brother found their survival among their German companions to depend in a degree upon force of arms and fists. Malcolm was a serious boy, not especi- ally combative, but he soon learned not to fear a "German militarist" of twice his size. Within school his energy appears to have been employed largely in passive resistance to the admirably organized system of forcing a knowledge of Latin grammar upon the unwilling mind. Ou. tside school his resistance to evil, if less passive, was perhaps equally passionate. He left Germany with some knowledge of the language and with 'no great love for the German schoolboy, who appeared to him to be both a bully and a talebearer. Meanwhile his father had been called to the chair of English literature at Stanford University. Returning home, Malcolm came first under the tuition of Miss Irene Hardy, who did much to repair the 'devastation wrought by the German method upon his soul, which had been driven inward upon itself. Miss Hardy thought the case interesting, and found a way of drawing him out. Lat- er on he studied under two teachers to whom he owed much, Mr. Frank Cramer and Mr. (now Professor) J. O. Snyder. In due time he naturally took the course (in Zoology) at Stanford University, where he received* his degree in 1904. From his fifteenth year on, he had been a member of several collecting ex- peditions, in which he early had the advantage of the companionship and exam- ple of such men as Ray Lyman Wilbur, Dane Coolidge, and W. W. Price. Be- fore receiving his degree he had tramped thousands of miles, collecting and studying the flora and fauna of Arizona and California, and had gone to Alaska with Mr. Stone. He became a member of the Cooper Ornithological Club in 1901, and? though circumstances prevented him from devoting himself specially to Ornithology, he was to the last in correspondence with that Society. Dr. Grinnell informs me that Malcolm has to his credit the following titles: "Birds of the Siskiyou Mountains, California: a Problem in Distribution" [with Joseph Grinnell] (Proc. Acad. Nat. Sci. Phila., January, 1903, pp. 4-15). "A List of Birds from the Santa Cruz Mountains, California" [with Hubert O. Jen- kins] (Condor, v, November, 1903, pp. 153-155). That is of course a very slender showing, as he would have been the first to acknowledge had he considered the matter worth speaking of. I know that he keenly regretted his inability through lack of time to do more..But his note- books prove him to have been a careful observer and an eager collector of birds. In 1904 he was chosen by the London Zoological Society to conduct the Duke of Bedford's Exploration of Eastern Asia. As he was under the immediate
