Supplement to "Nature" February 5, 1903. 



111 



SUPPLEMENT TO ' NATURE." 



THE LATE LORD LILFORD, 

 Lord Lilford on Birds. Being a Collection of Informal 

 and Unpublished Writings by the late President of 

 the British Ornithologists' Union. With contributed 

 Papers upon Falconry and Otter Hunting, his favourite 

 Sports. Edited by Aubys Trevor Battye, M.A., F.L.S., 

 &c, Member of the British Ornithologists' Union, 

 and illustrated by Archibald Thorburn. Pp. xvii -f- 

 312. (London : Hutchinson and Co., 1903.) Price 

 its. net. 

 Lord Lilford. Thomas Littleton, Fourth Baron, F.Z.S., 

 President of the British Ornithologists' Union. A 

 Memoir by his Sister. With an Introduction by the 

 Bishop of London. Illustrations by Thorburn and 

 Others, and a Portrait in Photogravure. (London : 

 Smith, Elder and Co., 1900.) 



THE figure of the late President of the British 

 Ornithologists' Union, one 01 the earliest sup- 

 porters of the Ibis, seen as sketched unconsciously 

 by himself in the extracts from private correspondence 

 and diaries given in Mr.Trevor B ittye's beautifully got up 

 and illustrated volume, and in the memoir published a 

 little earlier by a sister, is very attractive and very 

 pathetic — the bodily presentment of the fascination of 

 wild nature triumphant over pain. 



Lord Lilford's life is the story of "a buoyant and 

 vigorous nature, slowly cut off by the inexorable trammels 

 of physical disability from what it most keenly enjoyed, 

 the opportunity of personal observation in a large sphere, 

 the delight of new impressions, the large sympathy with 

 a perpetually increasing world of nature and man," 

 but retaining to the end the lightheadedness and 

 kindly consideration for others, and the absorbing 

 interest in bird and beast which distinguished him as a 

 boy. 



The words quoted above in inverted commas are 

 taken from Bishop Creighton's introduction to Mrs. 

 Drewitt's book. 



The prematurely old man, crippled with gout, who j 

 hopes it may clear up in the afternoon that he may be 

 wheeled out to see a new consignment of owls just 

 arrived from Finland, and writes from his sick room to a 

 friend who had been near a rock reputed to be the home 

 of a reptile to be found nowhere else, without having 

 been able to land, " I would have seen those lizards or 

 known the reason why," is the child who, half-a-century 

 before, had begged his mother to let him bring home 

 in a band-box a lizard caught at Holland House, where 

 they had been calling, and had jumped up from his first 

 whipping for some infantine offence with " It didn't hurt 

 very much ! , Look ! There is a brown owl flying by ! " 



" E'en in our ashes live their wonted fires." 



Like Edward, the Banff shoemaker— his counterpart 



in a humbler sphere— Lord Lilford was a born naturalist. 



The two men— wide as they stood apart on the social 



ladder — had much beside a Christian name in common. 



NO. 1736, VOL. 67] 



The "ruling passion" which made the ragged urchin 

 Tom Edwards carry the wasp's nest to school tied up in 

 his shirt and earned him many "skelpings" for frighten- 

 ing his mother and her neighbours by bringing home 

 "puddocks," horse-leeches and other "venomous 

 critters" was the same that led Tom Powys to smuggle 

 little bitterns into his Harrow study and brought tears 

 into the eyes of the "Irish Slavey" in Half Moon 

 Street when the armadillos brought home in a four- 

 wheeled cab by the gentleman lodger — " scaly beasts " — 

 killed her cat. 



A new or rare bird had the same magic power on 

 both. The sight could charm the one into unconscious- 

 ness of gout and helplessness, and make the other forget 

 the pinch of hunger and empty pockets. 



It is for its aviaries that Lilford Hall is best known to 

 readers of Nature. Of these — at one time among the 

 most extensive and best cared for in England, perhaps 

 in Europe — a very interesting description is given in a 

 presidential address to the Northamptonshire Field Club 

 delivered by the owner in 1894 and now reprinted in Mr. 

 Trevor Battye's book. 



Like most carefully thought-out things, they were of 

 slow growth. Lord Lilford had kept birds from child- 

 hood, and in Christ Church days was already able to 

 send Prof. Newton an imposing list of his possessions. 

 But it was not until later that he began collecting in 

 earnest. 



" I have only gone in for a large and serious col- 

 lection," he wrote the year before his death in a 

 touchingly apologetic letter to a lady who had ap- 

 parently expressed her views on keeping birds in 

 confinement, " since I became crippled and, therefore, 

 could not see birds elsewhere than at home." 



He was always ready to give from his stock to help 

 the acclimatisation of a new or reestablishment of a van- 

 ishing bird. 



In 1872, he wrote to Lord Walsingham, at the time 

 personally unknown to him, offering a present of twenty 

 brace of Virginian colins to be turned out at Merton, 

 where, as he thought, the country should exactly suit 

 them. A few years later, at first one, and after that a 

 second, hen great bustard was sent to the same neigh- 

 bourhood in the hope of inducing a fine old cock who 

 had appeared on a fen near Thetford to set up house 

 again in an old favourite home of the family. Unluckily, 

 the experiment was not successful. 



"When the great bustard honoured me with its visit," 

 writes Mr. Upcher, on Whose property the bird had 

 established itself, " Lilford, in his desire to reestablish 

 them in the country, sent me a female from his aviaries. 

 I kept a man watching night and day lest some conscience- 

 less collector should come on the prowl. He reported 

 that they seemed to get quite fond of one another 

 and he verily believed almost touched. Then, alas ! 

 came an out-of-season snowstorm and the poor hen 

 succumbed. Lilford, in his generosity, sent another lady, 

 but my lord did not approve of the change and departed, 

 getting safely out of the country." 



On almost every page 01 Lord Lilford's notes are to be 

 found texts on which sermons on natural history might be 

 written. But these and the journals of yachting trips 



