438 Letters, Extracts, tyc. 



rather a true representation of bird-life and haunts/ There, 

 however, the resemblance ends. Booth took the British 

 Islands for his hunting-grounds, but the life-work of the 

 owner of the Christchurch Museum has been almost entirely 

 done in the New Forest district, which the Victoria County 

 History defines, for the purposes of natural history, as the 

 tract of country lying between Southampton Water on the 

 east and the Avon on the west. 



" As a rule, the breeding species, whether resident or simply 

 coming here for nesting purposes, are represented by the 

 male and female ; and, wherever possible, nest, eggs, and 

 immature young are added. The cases in which the birds 

 are mounted are small; but the principle laid down by 

 Booth of a close adherence to natural surroundings, and 

 insisted on in the Bird-Gallery of the Natural History 

 Museum, is here followed. According to the last-published 

 Catalogue (1894), there are about a hundred cases of 

 Passerine birds, of which the most important are an 

 Alpine Accentor, shot in the old Castle gardens in 1855 ; 

 the Bearded Titmouse, now extinct in the district ; the 

 Golden Oriole, which has nested on Lord Malmesbury's 

 estate, and of which species there is an egg in the col- 

 lection ; locally-killed Choughs (1861); and the Nut- 

 cracker, the actual specimen referred to by the late 

 John Henry Gurney in his ' Rambles of a Naturalist.' The 

 Picarian birds occupy about a dozen cases, the most important 

 being the Roller and the Bee-eater ; and there are some 

 excellent examples of the Hoopoe, which is probably increasing 

 as a breeding species. The Eagle Owl and Snowy Owl came 

 from the Grantley- Berkeley Collection, dispersed many years 

 ago; but the evidence for their occurrence in Hampshire 

 would scarcely satisfy Ornithologists of the present day. 



" The gem of the museum is the case of Honey- Buzzards ; 

 the male and female were obtained in 1860, when several 

 pairs of these birds visited the Forest, and a nestling was got 

 in 1875. 



" Other noteworthy examples of Birds of Prey are a pair of 



