174 BRITISH BIRDS. 



A love of natural history developed in him very early, 

 and as a boy all available time out of school was spent 

 wandering about collecting eggs, etc. ; he possessed 

 also a great taste for practical mechanics. In 1846 he 

 entered the Lynn branch of Gurney's (now Barclay's) 

 Bank, where his father was at the time chief cashier. 

 In 1851 he read his first paper before the " Lynn Con- 

 versazione and Society of Arts," choosing as his subject 

 " Carbon." The following year he moved to the 

 Pakenham branch of the bank. 



In 1853 began a correspondence between Southwell 

 and Professor Alfred Newton, which developed into a 

 friendship,* terminated only by the death of the latter 

 fifty-four years later. In the same year he was made a 

 Life Fellow of the Royal Botanical Society of Edinburgh, 

 and shortly afterwards he left the bank and joined his 

 brother Charles, then managing partner in Castell and 

 Brown, a firm of wholesale confectioners in London. 

 His health, however, gave way, and he returned to Lynn 

 in 1866, and in the following year he re-entered Gurney's 

 Bank at Norwich, and settled in that city. 



In 1868 he was elected on the Committee of the Norwich 

 Museum, and in the year following the Norfolk and 

 Norwich Naturalists' Society was established. To the 

 Transactions of that Society he contributed nearly one 

 hundred papers, and, after having served as honorary 



* "A friendship of more than fifty years." In Mem., Professor A. 

 Newton, by T. Southwell, Trans. Nor. and Nor. Nat. Soc. viii., 520 

 (1908); and in a letter to the present writer, dated June 15th (1907) 

 he writes : — " I knew you would be shocked to hear of dear old 

 Newton's death, he was such a splendid fellow and so good to every- 

 body who was worth being good to : it is fifty-four years since I was 

 introduced to him, and we have been friends ever since. My last 

 letter from him was dated April 29th, sending me a copy of Mulso's 

 Letters to Gilbert White. I was somewhat prepared for what followed, 

 as he told me he was suffering from dropsy, and Miss Newton (his 

 niece) kept me informed as to the course of his illness. J. H. Gurney 

 and I went to the funeral, which was largely attended by College Dons 

 and Naturalists. I shall miss him greatly. The obituary notice in 

 " The Times " is the best I have seen and is quite approved by the 

 family it brings out some of his marked peculiarities, such as con- 

 tempt for' unearned honours and all pretence and assumption, and 

 his fervent love for his favourite science." 



