OBITUARY. 273 



at home on Sunday evenings to young students of zoology, and all who 

 have taken part in these pleasant reunions will know how helpful he 

 invariably was to any young man who was working at any branch of 

 zoology. In this, as in his influence on the study of ornithology, he 

 will be sorely missed, and there is no one who can take his place. 



Although permanently lame, owing to an accident in early child- 

 hood, he did good work as an outdoor naturalist, and travelled con- 

 siderably, visiting Norway, Lapland, Spitzbergen, Iceland, the West 

 Indies, and North America, making excellent use, as his writings show, 

 of his opportunities to study the habits of birds in their native haunts. 

 A keen oologist, Professor Newton amassed a very good collection 

 of eggs, almost entirely of Palsearctic species, and of some, chiefly 

 northern, a very large series — and this valuable collection he has be- 

 queathed to the Cambridge University Museum. His chief hobby was, 

 however, his library of ornithological and zoological books, and when- 

 ever a rare ornithological work was in the market he would use every 

 endeavour to secure it, usually with success. Hence this library, 

 which he has also bequeathed to the Cambridge University, is extremely 

 rich, and contains several of the rarest and most valuable ornithological 

 and oological works. 



Though very broad-minded, Professor Newton was somewhat con- 

 servative, and to the last he was strongly averse to the extreme sub- 

 division of species, often on the very slightest grounds, now so prevalent 

 amongst some ornithologists of the present day, as also to the use (or, 

 we may almost say, abuse) of trinomial appellations, he being essenti- 

 ally a binomialist. 



Professor Newton was the fifth son of William Newton, of Elvedon 

 Hall, Suffolk, formerly M.P. for Ipswich, and was born at Geneva on 

 the 11th of June, 1829. Educated at first by a private tutor, he 

 graduated at Cambridge in 1853, and was appointed Travelling Fellow 

 of Magdalene College in 1854, and then visited the countries above 

 enumerated. He was subsequently a vice-president of the Eoyal, 

 Linnean, and Zoological Societies, and was awarded the gold medal of 

 the Linnean Society, and in 1900 one of the Eoyal Society's medals. 



I first made Professor Newton's acquaintance in 1858, on my return 

 to England from Finland, when he came to my father's town house to 

 examine the collection I had made during my sojourn in Sweden and 

 Finland, and since then he has been the most constant and truest friend 



it has been my good fortune to possess. 



H. E. Dresser. 



Znal. 4-th ser, vol. XL, July. 1907. 



