178 CONTRIBUTORS TO THE FIRST SERIES OF ' THE IBIS.' 



defect in the avoocI, lia.d become woriij present no worse figures 

 than they had done before. In the spring of 1833, John 

 Hancock, with another friend, accompanied the late Mr. Hew- 

 itsoii on a birds'-nesting expedition to Norway, the results 

 of which were made known by the last-named gentleman in 

 his well-known Oological work, and briefly, though more 

 connectedh% in the short-lived ' Magazine of Zoology and 

 Botany' (ii. pp. 309-317). Just fifteen years later Hancock 

 joined the late Charles St. John on a tour with the same 

 object in the then almost equally unexplored northern district 

 of Sutherland ; but his field-experience was otherwise mainly 

 gained in his own neighbourhood, where, on the 26th of 

 September, 1838, he chanced to fall in with an example, the 

 first recognised in the British Isles, of the little Ijird at that 

 time called the " Dalmatian Regulus," but now well known, 

 and hardh^ to be deemed an unusual visitor to Western 

 Europe, as the Yellow-browed Warbler [Phylloscojnis sttper- 

 ciliosus). Of this species, the specimen shot by himself at 

 Hartley on the coast of Northumberland, which he afterwards 

 figured in his '^ Birds of Northumberland and Durham,' is 

 still to be seen in iiis collection. In that same year, and 

 only a short time before, the British Association met at 

 Newcastle, and Hancock's "Remarks on the Greenland and 

 Iceland Falcons," subsequently published in the * Annals of 

 Natural History' (ii. pp. 241-250), attracted not a little 

 attention. He lay, however, at that time under the grave 

 mistake (though therein he was by no means alone) of con- 

 founding the adult Faico candicans with its young, and of 

 describing this last as resembling the immature stage of 

 Falco islandus — an error that he was not able to correct until 

 1854 (Ann. & Mag. Nat. Hist. ser. 2, xiii. p. 110), and few 

 have since been rash enough to controvert the truth of the 

 views he then enunciated * ; for he was indefatigable in 



* For comments on botli of these subjects, so inseparably connected 

 with Mr. Hancock's name, the readers of ' The Ibis ' may be referred to 

 our vouime for 1 862 (pp. 44-57), in which both ai'e treated at some length 

 according to the light that then existed. For later remarks on the Falcon 

 question reference may be made to the ' Annals and Magazine of Natural 

 History' (series 4, xii. pp. 485-487). 



