296 Obituary. 



Ladakh, intent upon some mysterious expedition into 

 Central Asia. Col. Irby is paying a flying visit to his old 

 quarters in Southern Spain, and will possibly cross to 

 Marocco. Mr. E. C. Taylor has left Egypt and is shortly 

 returning to England. He has, as we anticipated, succeeded 

 in making some interesting additions to the Egyptian avi- 

 fauna. 



Xyi\l.—Obituartj. 



Colonel Henry Maurice Drummond-Hay. — We have to 

 regret the removal, at a ripe old age, of the first President of 

 the British Ornithologists' Union, one of the original twenty 

 who in the year 1858 founded ' The Ibis,' and of whom, after 

 an interval of 38 years, eleven still remain among us. 



Henry Maurice Drummond, youngest son of Vice-Admiral 

 Sir Adam Drummond, K.C.B., and Lady Charlotte, daughter 

 of the 4th Duke of Athole, was born 7th Jan., 1814, at 

 Megginch Castle, Co. Fife, the ancestral seat of the family, 

 members of which, for several generations after the Union, 

 had represented Fife in Parliament. From his childhood he 

 was an enthusiastic field-naturalist, and when on leaving 

 school he was sent abroad to study modern languages, in 

 several of which he was a proficient, he spent much time in 

 the workshop of M. Linder, at that time the best authority 

 on the ornithology of Switzerland and the Alps. Here he 

 practised taxidermy, which to the day of his death was the 

 favourite resource of his leisure hours, and few could so 

 successfully mount a bird in a natural and life-like attitude, 

 for few were so familiar with the action of the bird in life. In 

 June 1832 Drummond-Hay received his commission in the 

 42nd Royal Highlanders (the Black Watch), in which regiment 

 he served for twenty years, at Malta, Corfu, Bermuda, and 

 Halifax, Nova Scotia. During all this time he was unwearied 

 in studying the ornithology and ichthyology of his difierent 

 stations and of their neighbouring countries, and lost no 

 opportunity of making excursions into districts which were 

 at that time untouched by the naturalist. He became a 



