Journal of Travel and Natural History 1 63 



HAMLET CLARK'S LETTERS HOME/" 



THIS is a posthumous publication. The author is beyond the 

 reach of our praise or blame. The one cannot gratify 

 him, nor the other wound him. Neither title-page nor preface 

 tell us this, but we know otherwise that the author died after both 

 were printed off, and when the plates alone were waited for to 

 complete the work. As he tells us in his preface, it was a pleasant 

 relief to him on a sick bed to look over and carry through the 

 press the old " Letters Home," of which this little work consists. 

 From that sick bed he never effectively rose. Within a few weeks 

 after he wrote this, he passed from amongst us, leaving his "Letters 

 Home" as a last little contribution to science and literature. 



The reader may naturally expect that the work being posthumous, 

 the criticism will be unbiased. We shall try to make it impartial, 

 but we cannot make it unbiased. We knew him, we loved him — 

 to know him luas to love him, and to speak of him without a bias 

 is to us impossible. 



The Rev. Hamlet Clark was the eldest son of the Rev. Henry 

 Clark, vicar of Harmston, Lincoln; born in 1823, he died in 1867, 

 at Rhyl, in the 44th year of his age. He was educated at Beverley. 

 Like all men who are endowed by nature with any special talent, 

 he early shewed his gift. His talent was Natural History, and 

 chance directed it to Entomology. 



His first station as a clergyman was at Northampton, and there 

 for some ten years he fulfilled diligently and successfully his clerical 

 duties. His leisure hours he devoted principally to entomology. 

 That science has reached such gigantic proportions, that it is 

 impossible for any one man to master every branch of it. Hence 

 a division of labour has become a necessity, and men now take 

 up some single more or less extensive section of the subject, and, 

 confining themselves to it, master it, resting content with a more 

 superficial knowledge of what lies beyond it. Hamlet Clark 

 began with British beetles, and from the chance circumstance that 

 the locality where he found himself was especially favourable for 



• Letters Home from Spain, Algeria, and Brazil, during past Entomological 

 Rambles. By the Rev. Hamlet Clark, M.A. London : 1867. 



