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ON DE. BULL'S "NOTES ON THE BIEDS OF 



HEEEEOEDSHLRE." 



[By Henry T. Whabton, M.A., Oxon., M.R.C.S., F.Z.S., M.B.O.U., Etc.] 



Since our last autumnal gathering, to the recurrence of which each year all 

 of us who are lovers of fungi look forward with such keen anticipation, a wider 

 world than ours has been enriched by the publication of "The Birds of Hereford- 

 shire," to give the book the abbreviated title which the binder has put upon its 

 cover. The compilation of the volume was one of the pet by-works — wdpepya 

 a Greek would have called such — of our loved and lamented master, the late Dr. 

 Bull. But he was not spared to see it set up in type. It has occurred to me that 

 the issue of this book ought not to be passed over lightly in the annals of the 

 Woolhope Club, and that a few notes about it would not be unwelcome to those — 

 and that category, I fancy, comprises all of us here present to night — who hold 

 Dr. Bull, in some niche of their hearts, as one of the most lovable of all the men 

 they may have met. To think that he, had he lived to see his book through the 

 press, would willingly have left the outside world opportunity to imagine that he 

 had appropriated the work and the observations of others and called them his own, 

 is so repugnant to those who knew his large-heartedness and his humility as to be 

 hardly worthy of repudiation. But every one who knew him loved him, and those 

 who knew him most are the best qualified to understand how he appreciated and 

 was grateful to those labourers whose combined work enabled him to piece to- 

 gether the "Notes on the Birds of Herefordshire." Dr. Bull, as we knew him 

 while the charm and candour of his personality enlightened our re-unions, was the 

 last person in the world to give as his own the work of others. Far rather would 

 he have ascribed to some less conspicuous person what was really the result of 

 their joint observations. Self-assertiveness was about the very last vice of which 

 those who knew him could accuse him. 



The first duty of a critic is obviously to learn the limitations to the scope 

 of an author's work with which the title-page in brief acquaints him. But yet how 

 often even a bibliographer is puzzled when he knows a book by nothing but the 

 inscription which the binder has put upon its cover. Every librarian has examples 

 by the hundred at his fingers' ends of the pitfalls into which the binder has led the 

 unwary. Even titles themselves often lead to strange mistakes, and if a plain title 

 can be misleading, what can we not expect from an abbreviated one ? 



Let us now, therefore, before considering the posthumous work of our dear 

 friend, take note of what it promises upon its title-page. The full title runs thus : 

 " Notes on the Birds of Herefordshire, contributed by Members of the Woolhope 

 Club, collected and arranged by the late Henry Graves Bull, M.D." How could a 

 disclaimer have been made more clear ? In the first place, the book professes to 

 be nothing but notes ; in the second, Dr. Bull arrogates nothing to himself but the 

 collection and arrangement of observations made by others. He was much too 

 modest to propound that even a single observation was independently his own. The 

 publication, from time to time, of his papers, which form the foundation of the 



