144 BRITISH BIRDS. [vol. xv. 



Nor shall I easily forget the intense interest he displayed in 

 1920 in the doings of the solitary bees which, he had discovered, 

 built their nests in the mortar of the village houses. 



With this intense absorption of his in the details of what 

 happened to come beneath his eye in his own village and his 

 own countryside, it was sometimes difficult to remember that 

 he was a distinguished scholar of world-wide reputation. 

 But then one would look round his library again and see half 

 of it filled with books on the classics and early religion, and 

 realise that he was one of the leading authorities on the history 

 and the interpretation of the religion of classical Rome. 



So the evening would pass in the library ; and after dinner 

 he and his sister would play a Mozart duet — for Mozart was 

 another of his loves, and he not only knew all that Mozart 

 had composed, but had written a booklet on the composer and 

 his music ; and so early to bed with the Owls hooting round. 



I had one standing ornithological dispute with him. In 

 one of his books he records having heard a Tree-Creeper singing, 

 and comments on the rarity of the occurrence. When I 

 asserted that I used to be woken up by the song of Creepers in 

 a Surrey wood, and, anyhow, that I could hear their song every 

 fine i\pril day in Oxford, he alwaj^s shook his head with an 

 unconvinced smile at the errors of youth. At last one day I 

 heard the bird singing in his own garden — but, alas, he was 

 too deaf to hear it, and he still did not believe. That was 

 typical of him, too, the holding firmly to whatever he thought 

 or believed. It is a comfort that he will not wholly die. 

 People will continue to read his books because they contain 

 so much of himself. The lov^e of nature for its own sake is 

 as valuable a human trait as the love of truth or of knowledge 

 for its own sake, or of men and women for their own sakes. 

 Warde-Fowler had that love of nature, and his books are 

 full of the spirit of the love of birds and of all animated things. 



Julian S. Huxley, 



Mr. War de-Fowler's output of purely ornithological work was 

 not large. He is perhaps best known by two pleasantly written 

 little books, A Year with the Birds, published anonymously 

 in 1886, which reached a third edition, and Tales of the Birds 

 (1888). Kingham Old and N ei0 also contains some references 

 to local bird-life. His observations on Oxfordshire bird-life, 

 mostly contributed to the Zoologist between 1885 and 1916, 

 contains many references to the Marsh-Warbler, and in 1906 

 he summarized the results of fourteen years' observations on 

 this species in an article in the Zoologist (pp. 401-9). 



F.C.R.J. 



