OBITUARY. 455 



tabulate information from every source was simply astonishing. At 

 the same time no man was ever further from the ideal of the mere 

 cabinet naturalist. There was hardly a mile of rocky or precipitous 

 coast-line girding either the Irish mainland or any of the outlying 

 islands which Mr. Ussher had not personally explored in his ceaseless 

 search for the breeding haunts of the rarer Irish birds. There was 

 scarcely a lake or a marsh of any extent throughout all the midland 

 counties which he had not explored with equal zeal. A fearless 

 swimmer and climber, he penetrated the least accessible haunts of 

 the various Falcons, Petrels, and Divers whose habits he had made 

 it his vocation to study. His famous collection of birds' eggs — a 

 collection originally begun, we understand, on the suggestion of the 

 late Mr. Howard Saunders — was one of the fruits of his untiring 

 activity as an explorer and climber. It was an education to be shown 

 through even a small portion of it. After the publication of his fine 

 volume, ' The Birds of Ireland,' which appeared in 1900, Mr. Ussher 

 parted with his great collection of eggs, the major portion of which was 

 acquired by the Dublin National Museum ; and it is hardly an exaggera- 

 tion to say that these are now amongst the most valuable possessions 

 in the Natural History Department. The Museum also owes to 

 Mr. Ussher that most excellent guide to its ornithological collection, 

 the ' List of Irish Birds,' which he drew up with the utmost care in 

 1908 to bring up to date the information published in the similar list 

 drawn up in 1890 by A. G. More. Mr. Ussher's list, like Mr. More's 

 before it, is now the inseparable vade mecum of every Irish ornitho- 

 logist when he visits unfamiliar ground. The amount of information 

 compressed within its fifty-four pages seems almost miraculous. 



Of late years Mr. Ussher's indomitable energy found vent in 

 investigations bearing on the prehistoric fauna of the country — a 

 source of study he had hardly ventured to tap while absorbed in the 

 preparation of his chief ornithological work. Perhaps he was largely 

 stimulated to the cave-digging explorations that resulted in such 

 important finds by his remarkable discovery of numerous remains of 

 the extinct Great Auk in "kitchen-middens" on the coast of Water- 

 ford, and subsequently in a few other localities. Be this as it may, 

 his zeal for cave research quickly became a passion, and resulted in 

 most important additions to our knowledge of the animal life of 

 Ireland in the dim and distant past. Summer after summer — in 

 company with Dr. Scharff, and sometimes with other devoted 

 zoologists — Mr. Ussher would shift his quarters to the vicinity of 

 some unexplored Irish cavern and spend weeks in superintending 



