154 Letters, Extracts, Notices, S^c. 



nectedly, in the short-lived ' Magazine of Zoology and 

 Botany^ (ii. pp. 309-317). Just fifteen years later Han- 

 cock joined the late Mr. Charles St. John on a tour witti the 

 same object in the then almost equally unexplored northern 

 district of Sutherland; but his field-experience was other- 

 wise mainly gained in his own neighbourhood, where, on 

 the 26th of September, 1838, he chanced to fall in with an 

 example, the first recognized in the British Islands, of the 

 little bird at that time called the " Dalmatian Regains,'^ but 

 now well known, and hardly to be deemed an unusual visitor 

 to Western Europe, as the Yellow-browed Warbler [Phyllo- 

 scopus super 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 his 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 of 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 

 making observations on such birds as came in his way, and 

 though comparatively few of these liave seen the light, time 

 has in most cases proved their accuracy. 



Another of his discoveries — as such it really was, for 

 though YarrelFs claim to priority is undoubted, no publi- 

 cation thereof had been made, and the fact was wholly 



* For comments on both these subjects, so inseparably connected with 

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

 volume for 1862 (pp. 44-57), in which both are 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). 



