392 Letters, Extracts, Notices, §c. 



Committee. 

 O. Salvin, Esq. 

 Howard Saunders, Esq. 

 R. Bowdler Sharpe, Esq. 



After a vote of thauks to the Chairman the Meeting 

 adjourned. The Annual Dinner, subsequently held at the 

 Cafe Royal, was attended by thirty-two Members and guests. 



Obituary. Mr. J. H. Gurney. — By the death of Mr. 

 John Henry Gurney, on the 20th of April last, not only 

 does the British Ornithologists' Union lose another of its 

 founders, but ' The Ibis ' one of its most constant and muni- 

 ficent supporters. Our deceased Member, the only son of 

 Joseph John Gurney, of Earlham in the county of Norfolk 

 (celebrated for the various philanthropic undertakings to 

 which he devoted the leisure of his life), was born on the 

 4th of July, 1819, and at the age of about ten years was sent 

 to a private tutor, who lived in Epping Forest. Thence he 

 went to the Friends' School at Tottenham, and on leaving it, 

 being then about seventeen years old, entered the banking 

 business at Norwich, in which his family had long been so suc- 

 cessfully engaged. His love of natural history showed itself 

 very early, and the writer of these lines was told by him of his 

 getting into a serious scrape at school by dissecting a bird on 

 a mahogany desk, which immediately afterwards revealed the 

 secret of the use to which it had been put as an operating 

 table, by the stains on its polished surface from the cam- 

 phorated spirit (supplied to the boys as a cure for colds, and 

 the only antiseptic liquid available) that he had employed 

 to avert the possibility of unpleasant odours from his 

 " subject." 



During his school-days in Essex he made the acquaintance 

 of Mr. Henry Doubleday, of Epping, so long known for his 

 ornithological and entomological collections, and from him 

 obtained, in 1836, an introduction to the equally well known 

 Mr. T. C. Heysham, of Carlisle, with whom he kept up for 

 many years a correspondence, chiefly on zoological matters — 



