Vice-President' s Address. 395 



"These prices," he once said to me, apropos of the ex- 

 travagant sums that were being paid for books selling at the 

 time in London, " are enormous. I would like to have the 

 books, but, only think of it ! one's library would need more 

 watching than the bank." 



But it was as a distinguished, scientific ornithologist that 

 Mr Gray was best known, and as such he will continue to 

 be remembered. His off-hand notices at this table of rare 

 species and varieties, but chiefly his " Birds of the West of 

 Scotland," bear emphatic testimony to his sterling qualities 

 as a naturalist, to the breadth and balance of his mind as an 

 observer, and the fulness of his furnishing in the systematic 

 knowledge and the literature of ornithology as an author. 

 His descriptions are as clear and crisp as definitions. The 

 work abounds in proofs of his extensive information, keen- 

 ness of eye, discriminating judgment, long familiarity with 

 the habits of birds in their favourite haunts, and of a memory 

 singularly retentive, , even of minute, specific, and variety 

 features. All this could not fail to make Eobert Gray 

 what he had become, — a foremost authority in recent Scottish 

 ornithology. 



4. To institutions as to individuals adverse circumstances 

 seldom come singly. The remark has become trite by being 

 in experience so often true. It has been so with our Society. 

 The loss sustained by the death of our Secretary is intensi- 

 fied by that of his assistant, Mr John Gibson, of the Natural 

 History Department of the Museum of Science and Art, a 

 comparatively short time after. Mr Gibson was admitted a 

 Fellow in 1869, Mr Gray in 1874. Mr Gibson was an 

 accomplished student of natural science, a man of exact busi- 

 ness habits, with a mind stored with the facts of several 

 branches of science. He was in every way peculiarly well 

 qualified to act along with Mr Gray in conducting the busi- 

 ness of the Society. Holding a position in which accuracy 

 of detail must keep in line with much general knowledge, 

 Mr Gibson had rapidly ripened in qualities which not only 

 made him a most intelligent expert in his proper work, but 

 which fitted him for the popular interpretation of science, 

 for divesting its facts of a somewhat forbidding, but for 



