A more ambitious book than the original was the Supplement to A History of the Birds of Europe, begun in earnest in 1890. Henry Dresser worked hard to obtain specimens towards the book, including downy chicks, skins and eggs of rare and newly described species, and birds from western Asia. Dresser and some of his contemporaries, notably Henry Seebohm and John Henry Gurney junior, continued to assess reports of rare birds to keep some kind of 'British list', and to separate fact from fiction and fraud. Through the 1890s and the following decade, Richard Sharpe made several accusations that Dresser had obtained specimens in an underhand way from the British Museum (Natural History) (BM(NH)). Sharpe established the British Ornithologists' Club (BOC) in 1892, as part of the ongoing rise of the BM(NH). The great private collections that were so distinctive of Britain had almost all passed to the BM(NH).