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OBITUARY. 



Joseph Abrahams. 



Mk. Joseph Abrahams, the well-known and widely-respected 

 Naturalist-dealer, was the son of Mr. Isaac Abrahams, of Leeds, 

 in which town he was born on June 26th, 1839. When only 

 sixteen years old he visited Victoria as one of the pioneers of 

 the gold-mining industry of the Bendigo and Ballarat goldfields, 

 and was the owner of the first miner's right to dig for gold. It 

 therefore was not until his return to England in 1861 and his 

 succession shortly afterwards to the business of his father-in-law, 

 Moses Nathan, that Mr. Abrahams commenced his researches into 

 the minute and yet important characters, the knowledge of which 

 raised him far above the level of the ordinary bird-dealer. 



Although almost entirely self-taught, it is no exaggeration to 

 say that in the sexing of birds no man was his equal ; he could 

 unhesitatingly pick out a pair of birds of any imported species 

 with such accuracy that, under favourable conditions, nesting 

 would be almost a certainty ; his eye became so trained to the 

 differences of male and female in birds of identical plumage that, 

 in ninety-nine out of a hundred cases, he would sex them at a 

 glance. In the case of the Parrots, however, this was not always 

 possible ; but having devoted five years to the preparation of 

 skulls from birds of which he had ascertained the sex by dissec- 

 tion, he accumulated such a mass of material that he was enabled 

 to discover a well-defined constant sexual distinction, enabling 

 him at all times to tell the sex of a Parrot whilst apparently 

 only tickling its face. Not satisfied with this structural differ- 

 ence alone, which was not always pleasant to ascertain in the 

 case of vicious and spiteful birds, this indefatigable student pro- 

 ceeded to note the colour of the irides, and ascertained that, in 

 the genus Chrysotis at any rate, the iris in the female was 

 decidedly paler than that of the male. The sexes of Love-birds 

 and Budjerigars, apart from colour-differences, he usually ascer- 



