xxxviii MEMOIR. 



Englishmen, who ' scorn delights and live laborious 

 days,' who by their frank love of truth and justice 

 have made our name respected from one hemisphere 

 to the other. I retain a dear memory of him," he 

 concludes, "and grieve to think that so much manly 

 spirit has so soon been quenched." 



This manly love of truth here noticed, his zeal 

 in action, and energy for work, had marked Frank 

 Oates conspicuously from a boy. Life was for him no 

 lounge, merely to be dreamed through, but an active, 

 burning reality, from which the fruit that the hour 

 yielded was to be plucked and harvested. From 

 his earliest days, when he watched at springtide the 

 coming of the swallow, or lurked in autumn by the 

 hedgerow, to note the flocks of redwings as they 

 passed — from the time when those authors whom he 

 loved had given him his first glimpses into that 

 distant realm of nature where his imagination loved 

 to wander, and he hoped one day to follow them — 

 till the arrival of the period when that desire was at 

 length destined to be realized, and he had threaded 

 the forests of tropical America, and roamed through 

 the thorny wastes of Southern Africa, was he ever 

 adding something to his knowledge of nature, some- 

 thing to his love of science, or something to his 

 appreciation of the beautiful. With him, indeed, 

 were no half measures. His interest once fairly 

 roused in any subject, he gave to it the strength of 



