402 THE ZOOLOGIST. 
Road, Hampstead,—returning in 1862 to Kingsbury, where he 
remained until 1865, when he proceeded to Cambridge to further 
the education of his nephews, he himself having never married. 
Thirty years of his life, therefore, were spent at Kingsbury, 
although during this time, and especially in the shooting season, 
frequent’ excursions were made to different parts of England and 
Scotland. He was especially fond of Snipe and Wildfowl 
shooting, and the present writer, who, as his pupil in later years, 
was often his shooting companion, has heard him speak with 
delight of the great fens of Cambridgeshire, Lincoln, and 
Huntingdon, parts of which he was old enough to remember in 
their undrained condition, with all their wealth and variety of 
bird-life. 
Bittern and Bustard were to be found, in his boyhood days, 
before the draining of the Fens, and butterflies of species now 
extinct were not uncommon, and used to delight the eyes of the 
young naturalist. The sunsets of the Great Fen, all the more 
striking from the wide sweep of horizon, were never forgotten, 
and the low flat scenery had always a charm for him in after 
life, from the memory of those days. 
In an eloquent lecture on the Fens, given to a Mechanics’ 
Institute at Cambridge, in 1867, Charles Kingsley spoke of a 
certain sadness as pardonable to one who has “ watched the 
destruction; of a great natural phenomenon which had turned a 
waste howling wilderness into a garden of the Lord. And yet,” 
he adds, ‘‘ the fancy may linger without blame over the shining 
meres, the golden reed-beds, the countless water-fowl, the 
strange and gaudy insects, the wild nature, the mystery, the 
majesty,—for mystery and majesty there were,—which haunted 
the deep fens for many hundred years. Little thinks the 
Scotsman, whirled down by the Great Northern Railway from 
Peterborough to Huntingdon, what a grand place even twenty 
years ago (1847) was that Holme and Whittlesea which is now 
but a black, unsightly, steaming flat, from which the meres and 
reed-beds of the Old World are’gone, while the corn and roots of 
the New World have not as yet taken their place. But grand 
enough it was,-ithat black ugly place, when backed by Caistor 
Hangland and Holme Wood and the patches of the primeval 
forest ; while dark green alders, and pale green reeds, stretched 
for miles round the broad lagoon, where the Coot clanked and 
