294 Alexander Goodman More. [iS82 



CHAPTER XLI. 



FIRST YEAR AS CURATOR. 



[1882.] 



" THE place is beginning to feel pleasant, but the cares 

 and plans for the future are a little heavy just at first," he 

 says, writing to Professor Newton, a month after his 

 appointment to the Curatorship. " I don't at all intend to 

 die, or retire, for a long time yet. Not until you shall see 

 what a Museum I will make it." This was reckoning 

 without his enemy ; but it was from no lack of enthusiasm 

 that the fulfilment fell short of the hope. " We are going 

 in for an entire reorganization of our native birds," he 

 writes in another letter (Dec. 2, 1881) ; and the height of his 

 ambition was to make the National Collection thoroughly 

 representative of every branch of the Fauna of Ireland. 



The value to Zoology of such an institution for " focus- 

 sing " a fauna, in a country like Ireland, where so many 

 rarities are pigeon-holed far apart in private collections, 

 can never be estimated without some knowledge of the 

 unending perplexities and doubts which attend the tracing 

 and authenticating of the numerous isolated specimens. 

 This source of confusion prevails, of course, chiefly in 

 Ornithology. " I believe it might be a good plan to make 

 a list of the existing specimens of the specially rare Irish 

 birds," he had once before (August, 1880) written to Mr. 

 Newton, who had consulted him as to the two Belted 

 Kingfishers killed in 1845 i n Ireland. Of these, one was 

 in the Kildare-street Museum, and the other in that of 

 Trinity College. They were both "right and safe " ; but it 

 proved a different matter when, in the spirit of his idea 

 about cataloguing existing specimens, he set about 

 endeavouring to verify the rarities in scattered private 



