±42 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



above named, the Natural History of the district was carefully 

 explored.* 



At this time there lived in Newcastle Mr. R. B. Wingate, a 

 good ornithologist and professional birdstuffer, who was also 

 the friend of Thomas Bewick (the celebrated wood engraver). 

 With Wingate Hancock was intimately acquainted, and often 

 visited him, saying "he was the first man in England who ever 

 stuffed a bird like life." It might perhaps be said his acquaint- 

 ance with Wingate had some influence on his own career, for in 

 1826 or 1827 he turned his attention to birdstuffing, an art in 

 which he soon learnt to excel. 



In 1851, at the Great Exhibition in London, Mr. Hancock 

 exhibited a series of groups illustrative of falconry. They are 

 now in the Newcastle Museum, and form part of the collection he 

 presented to the Natural History Society. Of these groups it 

 has been said that they were "vitalised by the feeling not of 

 the mere birdstuffer, but of the poet, who had sympathised 

 with Nature, felt the life of birds as sometimes kindred with his 

 own, and, inspired with this sympathy and labouring to utter it, 

 had thus re-created life, as it were, within the grasp of death." 

 He was one of the closest and most careful observers of bird-life 

 in this country, and his opinions were held in the highest esteem 

 by all ornithologists. 



He was not a great writer, and his printed contributions to 

 zoological literature were principally short papers communicated 

 to the Natural History Transactions of Northumberland and 

 Durham, and of the Tyneside Naturalists' Field Club. In the 

 1847 edition of Bewick's * British Birds' he drew up the 

 synopsis, and revised the nomenclature of the entire work. 

 In 1853 he published a series of lithographic plates, drawn on 

 the stone by himself, illustrating the groups of birds shown by 

 him at the Great Exhibition in 1851. In 1874 he published in 

 the Natural History Transactions above referred to a "Catalogue 

 of the Birds of Northumberland and Durham," illustrated by 

 fourteen plates lithographed from his own drawings. In the 

 Introduction to this Catalogue he gives a most interesting 

 account of some of the great centres of bird-life in the two counties, 



:: For those details of his early life we are indebted to his friend Mr. Wright, 

 for many years Curator of the Newcastle Museum. 



