MEMOIR. 



" To be able to give one's name to a bird, or a flower, may seem 

 to many but a poor ambition ; and yet, materially considered, it is 

 quite as likely to be perpetuated as to give it to a street or town, and 

 is much more likely to define the tastes and individuality of the 

 giver." — Bret Harte. 



The saying has seldom been truer of any one 

 than of the writer of the succeeding pages, that 

 u the child is father of the man." His love of 

 nature generally, and of natural history in all its 

 branches, was one of Frank Oates's earliest instincts ; 

 and to the study of our English wild birds — their 

 ways and haunts, their comings and their goings — 

 he was especially devoted from boyhood. The 

 pages of Waterton and Buffon, treating of wider 

 fields of study, supplied his imagination at that 

 period with richer food ; and the plates of Audubon's 

 Birds, when access could be had to them, were 

 turned by him with feelings little short of reverence. 

 From his earliest days he had resolved to visit 

 those distant, and to him, still mysterious lands, 

 where the page of nature was by the white man in 



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