480 Letters, Announcements, 6fc. 



journals, we must say a few words on the event which has 

 deprived the world of its greatest naturalist. The varied 

 qualifications of Charles Darwin have been recounted by 

 many an able pen ; but it behoves us in this place to dwell 

 especially on the value of his labours to the particular branch 

 of biology which it is the object of these pages to promote. 

 We venture to believe that we shall be only echoing the voice 

 of all our readers when we assert that there is not one of 

 them but has felt that the dignity of the study which he 

 pursues was raised every time that Mr. Danvin drew from it 

 evidence in support of that theory with which his name will 

 be in all time associated. We venture further to declare 

 that Mr. Darwin's ingenious investigations, his irresistible 

 interpretation of particular facts the significance of which 

 had never before been understood, but, above all, his mar- 

 vellous method of combining and correlating the results of 

 observation, must be recognized by all thinking ornitho- 

 logists as breathing into their science a living soul the exis- 

 tence of which was previously unsuspected, and as endowing 

 it with an interest and a beauty beyond any thing that it had 

 been supposed to possess. 



When we remember the way in which the Theory of Evo- 

 lution was, at its birth, scouted in so many quarters, it is with 

 no small satisfaction that we can turn to the earliest volume 

 of this periodical and point out how quickly the truth of the 

 Darwinian '' hypothesis,'^ as it used to be called in those days 

 of its dawn, was recognized by one of the oldest and most 

 valued of our contributors — one also by no means apt to be 

 driven about by vain blasts of doctrine. As the volume is 

 very scarce, and the passages may never have come under the 

 eye of many of our present readers, we think we may be 

 pardoned, long as they are, for reproducing these words here. 

 It is the testimony of an ornithologist given purely on orni- 

 thological grounds, without bias in any other direction, and 

 written and published, as we must particularly point out, 

 before the now celebrated ' Origin of Species ' appeared. 



'^Writing with a series of about 100 Larks of various 

 species from the Sahara before me, I cannot help feeling 



