182 FRANCIS ORPEN MORRIS 



the actual number of letters bearing on natural 

 history only that he had received. Having counted 

 up to thirteen thousand, he gave up the task, no 

 doubt thinking it a great waste of time to proceed 

 further with it merely for the sake of gratifying 

 his curiosity. Of his own letters, the most interest- 

 ing were some of those which he wrote for pub- 

 lication to various journals and magazines. Those 

 which he penned to private individuals were for 

 the most part brief, and devoid of those features 

 which would entitle him to be called an entertain- 

 ing letter-writer ; this may have been due to want 

 of time and care, but more probably it was owing 

 to a lack of that rare power which is needed to 

 make an interesting writer of letters. 



Of the thousands of letters on points of natural 

 history which he accumulated, there were few 

 better worth preserving than those addressed to 

 him by Thomas Edward, the famous naturalist, of 

 Banff. Many of these were inserted in the pages 

 of the Naturalist from time to time, and some 

 were afterwards introduced into Smiles' interesting 

 life of that remarkable man. Many of Edward's 

 letters were written to Mr. Morris when the 

 "History of British Birds" was going through 

 the press in monthly parts, and they nearly always 

 contained facts which could be, and very often 

 were, made use of. I cannot but give one or two 

 here which Mr. Smiles had probably not seen 

 when he wrote Edward's life; the first of them 

 turns upon a history of a spider which Edward 



