66 THE IBIS 



Finally, it was decided that the motto for the first 

 series of the Ibis should be : 



Ibimus indomiti venerantes Ibida sacram, 

 Ibimus incolumes qua prior Ibis adest. 



This did not meet altogether with Newton's approval. 



The Ibis motto as it now is I confess I do not under- 

 stand, but it is not worth while bothering about, and I 

 have never intimated my disapproval to Sclater. I think 

 I told you that Knox showed mine to the Bishop of 

 Oxford (Stubbs), and he very much approved of it, 

 though no doubt there was a solecism in the grammar. 



Though he was not at any time a very frequent con- 

 tributor of articles to the magazine, Newton did much 

 work in reviewing books and in other ways greatly 

 assisted Sclater, whom he succeeded as editor of the 

 second series of the Ibis (1865 to 1870). He was very 

 keen on starting discussions, so in 1865 he got G. D. 

 Rowley to write an article about the Cuckoo, or, as he 

 always spelt it, Cuckow, and then asked A. C. Smith to 

 write a letter of disagreement, thinking that " it will 

 make people take a greater interest in the journal in 

 which it appears." He did not want articles to be 

 " scientific catalogues, but rather readable, written in a 

 simply unaffected way." To a correspondent who com- 

 plained that the Ibis went out of his depth he replied that 

 he doubted it, " but if it does you must learn to swim 

 and the process is easy when you have made up your 

 mind to it, for our Holy Fowl is a typical wader and its 

 legs are not so very long after all." 



His period of editorship was a time of strenuous work 

 and of rapidly increasing responsibilities, so that he was 

 unable to undertake the third series, which was edited 

 by Osbert Salvin. Many years afterwards, writing to an 

 old friend who lay dying, he recalled the early struggles 

 of the Ibis. 



