394 Letters, Extracts, Notices, fyc. 



been publicly mooted ! He went on to say " it seems to me 

 impossible that any stuffed specimen can bear much resem- 

 blance to the living bird/' — a remark which, even allowing 

 for a general improvement of the taxidermist's art, is, on the 

 whole, as true now as it was then. 



Gurney's earliest published communication seems to have 

 been a note in the 'Annals and Magazine of Natural History' 

 for March, 1842 (vol. ix. p. 19), and was followed by another 

 in the same journal for June (torn. cit. p. 353), the subject 

 of both being ornithological occurrences in his own county. 

 In the next year ' The Zoologist' was established, and to this 

 he became a frequent contributor, publishing in the volume 

 for 1846, with the aid of Mr. W. R. Fisher, "An Account of 

 Birds found in Norfolk," — a very careful piece of work, and 

 for a good while the most ambitious that he attempted, 

 though he was constantly communicating short notes to that 

 periodical, and did so for the rest of his life. When the 

 scheme for founding 'The Ibis' was proposed, he entered 

 warmly into it. He not only attended the meeting held at 

 Cambridge in the autumn of 1858, when the preliminaries 

 were definitely arranged, and by his advice helped to mould 

 into a practicable form various proposals then made, but he 

 liberally promised to defray the cost of a plate for each num- 

 ber of the new Journal, in addition to the two plates for 

 which allowance was made in the original estimate. This 

 charge he continued to bear for the whole of the first series 

 of ' The Ibis,' only stipulating that the subject of each plate 

 that he presented should be a " Bird of Prey," — for he had 

 already made great progress in forming the now vast and 

 celebrated collection of " Raptores " in the Norwich Museum, 

 to which institution he had been a donor in 1828, when 

 he was but nine years of age. But he was by no means 

 exclusively devoted to this group of birds. He bought 

 a large portion of the ornithological collection formed by Mr. 

 Wallace in the Malay Archipelago, and presented it to the 

 Museum at King's Lynn (for which borough he sat as repre- 

 sentative in the House of Commons from 1854 to 1865), 

 while about the same time circumstances led him to take 



