302 Letters, Announcements, 6^c. 



Bengal Staff Corps. After nearly ten years' service in India, 

 he returned to England in the spring of 1867 on sick leave; 

 but his health improving, he sought and obtained the appoint- 

 ment of Zoologist to the Abyssinian Expedition, then preparing 

 (Ibis, 1868, p. 134). A relapse, however, compelled him to 

 forego this much-desired chance of distinguishing himself, and 

 he passed many months of suffering at home, which he again 

 quitted for India in the autumn of 1868. Arrived there, he 

 was in hopes of procuring a post in the Forest Department, 

 which would have given him excellent opportunities of con- 

 tinuing the zoological observations and studies to which he was 

 so strongly attached ; but unfortunately his malady increased, 

 and, notwithstanding a visit to the Himalayas, he was once 

 more sent home as an invalid, when he died at sea on the 3rd 

 of February last, at the early age of twenty-mne. We have 

 still in hand the manuscript of the concluding portion of his 

 ' Notes on Various Indian Birds,' which we hope shortly to 

 publish, for none can read the papers contributed by him to 

 this journal without recognizing in them the work of a true 

 naturalist ; and the loss of so promising a labourer in the field 

 of Indian Ornithology will be deplored by all. 



Though we have far exceeded our prescribed limits, the energy 

 of our contributors is such, that there yet remains to us a great 

 mass of papers the publication of which has for the present to 

 be deferred. A large number of ornithological works also, some 

 of much more than ordinary interest and excellence, still require 

 notices, notwithstanding the space devoted to that branch of our 

 labours in this and our preceding Number. Nor is the activity 

 of ornithologists likely to be soon diminished ; in this country 

 alone we hear that a work of unusual importance is contem- 

 plated by two of our friends, whose competency for their self- 

 imposed task w^ill be fully recognized by all as soon as the scope 

 of the publication and the names of its authors are announced, 

 while a new edition of Yarrell's 'British Birds' (the standard 

 authority on the ornithology of these islands) is said not only to 

 be in preparation, but its commencement likely to see the light 

 about the close of the present year. 



