434 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



OBITUAEY. 



ElCHARD J. USSHER, D.L. 



"We have to record with the greatest regret the death of this 

 well-known Irish ornithologist, who passed away on October 12th. 

 The following notice is taken largely from the Dublin ' Express ' of 

 October 16th, forwarded to us by the kindness of Mr. C. B. Moffat : — 



Not since the lamented death of Alexander Goodman More in 

 1895 have Irish naturalists sustained a loss that will be so poignantly 

 felt as that of Mr. E. J. Ussher, D.L., of Cappagh House, County 

 Waterford, whose remains were interred at Whitechurch, Cappagh, 

 on October 15th, in the presence of a large number of mourners. 

 Mr. Ussher's many excellent qualities both of head and heart 

 endeared him to a wide circle, and he had for a long time occupied 

 a prominent place in the local public life of his county. 



He will, of course, be chiefly remembered as an ornithologist, and 

 in a country in which the study of birds has had so many votaries 

 since William Thompson published his celebrated three volumes on 

 the birds of Ireland in the first half of the nineteenth century, it is 

 no small tribute to Mr. Ussher's real genius as an ornithologist that 

 he should have been by common consent elevated to the leading 

 place amongst them, and induced by the unanimous wish of his 

 brother naturalists to undertake the writing of the new standard 

 work on Irish birds, which had become a necessity in consequence of 

 the large amount of new matter that had accumulated since Thomp- 

 son's death. That task had originally been placed in the hands of 

 four leading Irish naturalists — the late A. G. More, Mr. Ussher, Mr. 

 E. M. Barrington, and Mr. Eobert Warren. But Mr. Ussher's 

 peculiar fitness for it so deeply impressed itself on his colleagues 

 that it was soon decided to place the writing of the book almost 

 entirely in his hands ; and rarely has a task so committed been dis- 

 charged with greater thoroughness and more inexhaustible patience." 



Mr. Ussher's correspondence with the bird-lovers and bird- 

 students of every Irish county, extending as it did over the long 

 series of years in which he was collecting material for his principal 

 book, would fill many volumes, and the pains he took to elicit and 



* ' The Birds of Ireland,' by R. J. Ussher and Robert Warren (1900). 



