16 MEMOIR OF THE LIFE OF JOHJT HANCOCK, 



Hancock's genius in this respect is innate, or whether it has 

 been developed in him from a study of his fellow-townsman 

 Bewick's labours, matters not much ; both artists may be rated 

 equally high as delineators of birds, while the younger one, 

 as the pages of this publication prove, stands as a naturalist 

 immeasurably above the elder." 



John was one of the original members of the Tyneside 

 Naturalists' Field Club, in 1846, and afterwards became a 

 member and a Yice-President of the Natural History Society, 

 he was also a member of the Literary and Philosophical Society. 



On the death of Albany Hancock in 1873 a movement took 

 place for a memorial to his memory, and his brother John sug- 

 gested that a new Museum would be the most appropriate and 

 desirable form for such a memorial. This movement was not 

 continued. 



About the year 1879 John conceived the idea of building such 

 a Museum upon the site it now occupies,* which is the most 

 suitable in the city, and his friend Col. Joicey, with great 

 liberality, purchased the site, which was of leasehold tenure by 

 the Magdalen Hospital under the Ecclesiastical Commission, and 

 enfranchised it. From that date John Hancock threw all his 

 energy into raising the necessary fund for the erection of the 

 building, and through his personal influence he at length ac- 

 complished what no one else could have done, raising the magni- 

 ficent sum of £39,000. 



The old Museum at the back of the Library of the Literary and 

 Philosophical Society had from its increasing collections become 

 much too small and inconvenient, and the ground occupied by it 

 was required by the North Eastern Railway Company. 



The Museum was begun in 1880, and completed in 1883. 

 When completed John Hancock presented to it his entire col- 



* Brand, after Bourne, tells us that this was the site of St. James' Chapel and of a 

 great Cross, not far from the harroios or burying places of lepers and plague-stricken 

 people in past centuries, situated by the side of the clear burn that anciently ran 

 across the Great North Eoad, but now under it in the form of a common sewer at the 

 place absurdly called the "Barras instead of 'Barrows' Bridge." The Magdalen 

 Hospital was not far from the site of the Chapel, and the burying ground belonged to 

 that Hospital, and the Cross stood within the "Maudlin barres" and without the 

 New-Gate.— Harleian MSS. 708, Escheats 12, Eich. II. 



