lU Brewsteb, //i 3/e»io?iam; Henry Augustus Purdie. [jan. 



fields, he seemed, oddly enough, not to be quite at home in them, 

 partly, no doubt, because he commonly went to them dressed in 

 ordinary city clothes, still more largely, perhaps, because he had an 

 awkward, ])lundering way of getting over fences, walls and ditches, 

 and through dense brush. Yet while another, better equipped 

 for such undertakings and apparently more skilful in performing 

 them, was ranging about quietly and systematically, it very often 

 happened that Henry Purdie was the first to detect the elusive 

 bird, the cunningly concealed nest, or the rare plant, of which they 

 were both in quest, apparently stumbling on it quite by chance, 

 but in reality guided to it, without doubt, by that intuitive sense 

 which is possessed by all good hunters and which he evidently had 

 in generous measure, making frequent use of it, however uncon- 

 sciously, whenever seeking hidden things. The collection of nests 

 and eggs ^ which he formed, although not large, contained an 

 excellent representation of those of the commoner birds of eastern 

 Massachusetts besides a considerable number of specimens intrinsi- 

 cally rare or of exceptional local interest, from this and various 

 other parts of North i\merica, but chiefly from New England. 

 Among the latter were several sets of the beautiful eggs of the 

 Olive-sided Flycatcher, which he took in the neighborhood of 

 Boston at various times before 1875. Prior to the year 1870, he had 

 confined his field work mostly to localities lying within easy reach 

 of West Newton, where he lived, but during the next following 

 decade he gave it wider scope, collecting with me at Lake Umbagog 

 (June 13-28, 1873, September 14-19, 1874, and May 10 -June 24, 

 1876) ; with J. N. Clark at Saybrook, Connecticut (in June, 1875) ; 

 with Ruthven Deane and Robert R. McLeod at Houlton, Maine 

 (in June, 1878). In June, 1881, he made a tour through New 

 Brunswick, where he met Montague Chamberlain for the first 

 time (they afterwards became intimate friends) and spent eleven 

 days at Campbellton on Bay Chaleur. Still later, after he had 

 become interested in botany, he went to the White Mountains 

 repeatedly in summer, was with me in camp at Lake Umbagog 

 on one or two occasions in autumn, and twice visited his brother 

 Alfred in Florida, remaining there for the greater part of two 



1 He gave a few of these to ornithological friends and most of the others to the 

 Museum of Comparative Zoology, Cambridge, several years before he died. 



