LIFE OF ALBANY HANCOCK, BY DR. EMBLETON. 123 



fair bust or two. He also designed and painted fish, flowers, 

 and fruit, thus cultivating and improving the faculties and the 

 tastes he was becoming more and more conscious of possessing, 

 and preparing, without knowing it, for his future work. He 

 delighted in beautiful and tasteful combinations of form and 

 colour, and was a great admirer and good critic of poetry and the 

 Pine Arts generally. 



Up to the age of thirty the subject of this memoir seems to 

 have had no fixed object in life. He had withdrawn entirely 

 from business, and indeed the simplicity of his habits and of his 

 whole life made business of little interest to him, and the purity 

 of his tastes and aspirations rendered work which had gain only 

 for its object utterly distasteful to him. 



Following the example of their father, Albany and his brothers 

 Thomas and John, together with their friends, Joshua Alder, the 

 Burnetts, William Hutton (joint author with Professor Lindley 

 of "The Possil Plora"), William Eobertson, E. B. Bowman, and 

 John Thornhill, botanists, and "W. C. Hewitson (author of "The 

 Eggs of British Birds" and of "Exotic Butterflies"), examined 

 afresh the whole of the surrounding district, making collections 

 of all natural objects. These were the chief men who, with 

 and after Bewick and his predecessors, gained for Newcastle its 

 reputation for the successful prosecution of Natural History. 



Albany was one of the principal promoters of the Newcastle 

 Polytechnic Exhibitions of 1840 and 1848, which gave a strong 

 impetus to the diffusion of general information and a love of 

 science among the public of the town and district ; and for the 

 acknowledged beauty of arrangement of these displays of art and 

 science much was due to his taste and exertions. 



Prom 1842 to 1864, in association with his friend Joshua 

 Alder, he was engaged in the study of Conchology, and in the 

 discovery of various new genera and species of Nudibranchiatc 

 Mollusca of the Northumberland Coast and other parts of the 

 British Islands, and in the delineation and description of their 

 external characters. Up to 1844, they had discovered and de- 

 scribed two new genera and thirty-one new species (Pep. Brit. 

 Assoc, 1844), though in the time of Linnaeus only six species 



