Obituary. 309 



working at the various subjects in which he was interested. 

 There^ as elsewhere, his premature death will always be 

 mourned. No man was ever more beloved or more 

 thoroughly deserved the high esteem in which he was held 

 by all who knew him. W. R. Ogilvie-Grant. 



Professor Robert CoXiLExx. 



It is with deep regret that we have to record the death of 

 our Honorary Member, Professor Collett of Christiania, 

 which took place in that city on the 27th of January last, 

 and was the result of a severe attack of influenza followed 

 by inflammation of the lungs. 



Robert Collett was the eldest son of the late Professor P. S. 

 Collett and of his wife Camille Collett, a well-known Nor- 

 wegian authoress. The family was of English origin, having 

 settled in Norway towards the end of the 17th Century. He 

 was born in Christiania on the 2nd of December, 1842, so that 

 he was seventy years old when he died. From his earliest 

 childhood he showed a great love of nature and of natural 

 history studies. He was educated at a school at Lillehamen 

 and afterwards at the University of Christiania, where he first 

 of all studied law, but his zoological instincts soon got the 

 upper hand. In 1871 he was appointed to a subordinate 

 post in the Museum of Christiania; here he remained for 

 the rest of his life, having been appointed Director in 1882, 

 and Professor of Zoology in the University in 1884. 



Collett was the author of a large number of papers and 

 separate works dealing almost exclusively with the Vertebrate 

 fauna of Norway and the neighbouring countries. The 

 earliest of these, "A Review of the Avifauna of the Neigh- 

 bourhood of Christiania,'^ published in the ' Ny t Magazin ' 

 for 1864, was favourably reviewed in 'The Ibis^ of the 

 succeeding year. This was followed by many other papers 

 and reviews dealing with Norwegian birds, while his most 

 popular work, ' Fugleliv i det arktiske Norge,' was trans- 

 lated into English by A. Heneage Cocks and published in 

 1894 under the title ' Bird Life in Arctic Norway, a Popular 

 Brochure.' 



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