3548 Notices of New Books : 



well with the catholicity of Natural History ; and were we ever to de- 

 tect such in any of our friends, we should no more think of recording 

 them approvingly, than of inviting attention to a limp or to a squint. 

 These prosy observations on prosy pages bring us to the fifteenth 

 chapter, written by one who alone was fitted to be the biographer of 

 Kirby. For such a work Mr. Spence possesses every qualification : 

 — a facility of expression ; a thorough knowledge of the deceased ; a 

 store of four or five hundred of his longest and best letters ; an admi- 

 ration and love of Kirby as a man and a philosopher ; and lastly, a 

 mind that ignores littlenesses and prejudices of all kinds. Directly 

 we enter on this chapter, we feel that we are in company with a man 

 who understands and appreciates the greatest of our entomologists. 



The following note by Mr. Spence, in reference to the numerous 

 letters which passed between himself and Mr. Kirby during their pro- 

 longed " friendship of nearly half a century," is very interesting (and 

 especially so the description of the "Royal Harry"), as illustrating the 

 vast amount of labour bestowed by two congenial minds upon their 

 favourite pursuit. 



u These letters, with which Mr. Freeman has furnished me, are 

 between four and five hundred in number; and those from Mr. Kirby, 

 which 1 have preserved with as much care as he had mine, are nearly 

 as many. About half of the two series of letters refer almost wholly 

 to Entomology and our book, but a great part of the remainder, ex- 

 changed during my eight years' travels and residence on the Conti- 

 nent, and after my return to England, are more occupied with accounts 

 of our tours, &c, and of domestic matters. Our entomological letters, 

 in those days of dear postage, were mostly written on sheets of large 

 folio paper, so closely, that each would equal a printed sheet of six- 

 teen pages of ordinary type. These we called our ' first-rates,' or 

 sometimes ' seventy-fours,' the few on ordinary-sized paper being * fri- 

 gates ; ' but one I find from Mr. Kirby, which he calls the ' Royal 

 Harry,' written on a sheet nearly the size of a ' Times ' Supplement, 

 and closely filled on three pages, and which he begins and concludes 

 thus : — ' Barham, March 23, 1816. My Dear Friend,— This doubt- 

 less will be the greatest rarity in the epistolary way that you ever re- 

 ceived. I hope it will long be kept among your huiMkux. and be shown, 

 not as a black, but as a black and white swan, which since the disco- 

 very of the former in N. S. W., must be held as the true rara avis. . 

 . . . And now, having manned this Royal Harry with as large a 

 complement of men as I could muster, 1 shall launch her. I question 

 whether ever one of equal tonnage before crossed the H umber.' With 



