and to set out, in its most attractive form, the 

 modern study of the life and history of birds. 

 Without in the least exaggerating what he did, 

 or mistaking promise for performance, we may, 

 without hesitation, set down the names of 

 Audubon, Wolf, and Seebohm, as those with 

 whom his work (if it had been maintained) 

 would have entitled him to rank in the 

 future : Audubon, because his gift for paint- 

 ing and drawing birds was developed even 

 earlier than it was in Audubon, and also because 

 he was a first-class field naturalist ; Wolf, 

 because, in painting birds his knowledge 

 of their daily life and sense of colour and 

 pictorial effect was of the same kind, and the 

 results he had already produced were such as 

 delighted that veteran animal painter himself, 

 of whom Landseer declared that " Before he 

 was a man, he must have been an osprey ; " 

 and Seebohm, because he had the same gift for 

 original observation in new and distant regions. 

 It is a thousand pities Dan Meinertzhagen 

 did not live to finish the monograph on "The 

 Eagles of the World " which he began at the 

 age of seventeen. In the exquisitely written 

 pages of this book, the young author set down 

 the most minute facts, gathered from the notes 

 of naturalists the world over, concerning these 



