xlvi Obituary Notices of Fellows deceased. 
tunities of doing a kindness to younger men, especially to those who had 
tastes akin to his own. His Sunday evening receptions were an important — 
feature in the scientific life of the University. Not a few of the naturalists 
who have risen into prominent positions in this country can look back 
to the stimulus they received from those meetings, where the advantages 
to be derived from personal intercourse among the younger workers were 
enhanced by the ever ready sympathy and encouragement of the genial 
_ professor. 
Newton was all his life a keen collector. His chief interests lay, of 
course, among birds, but he had the instincts of a true naturalist, and was 
always on the watch for specimens in all provinces of the animal kingdom 
which would help to enlarge and enrich the Museum at Cambridge. He was 
likewise a lover of books, and his rooms, with their well-filled shelves, 
showed the wide range of his literary tastes, and the success with which 
he had pursued the quest after rare and valuable works in natural history. 
He was, above all, a philosophical naturalist, intent rather on the higher 
and broader questions than on details of species or of structure. He was 
endowed, too, with a highly critical faculty, and could express his criticisms 
with pungent clearness. He could never be satisfied with anything less 
than the completest accuracy attainable, while his literary instinct led him to 
cultivate great simplicity of style, in which every word was well chosen, and 
none was redundant. 
These characteristic features of the Cambridge professor are specially to be 
noted in the numerous essays which he wrote on questions of large biological 
interest, such, for example, as the series of articles from his pen which 
appeared in the ninth edition of the ‘ Encyclopedia Britannica, and which 
formed the basis of his greatest work, the ‘Dictionary of Birds.’ This 
ornithological classic, issued in successive parts from 1893 to 1896, was 
prefixed with a Latin inscription to his youngest brother, Edward, who “ for 
more than fifty years had been his most assiduous fellow-student in orni- 
thological pursuits at home, abroad, under the open sky, and in caves.” It 
shows his critical acumen alike in what he selected for treatment and in what 
he omitted. His habitual caution is well illustrated by his choice of an 
alphabetical rather than a taxonomic arrangement of his subject, while the 
occasionally caustic force of his language is displayed in his preface, where he 
denounces some attempts at systematic arrangement as “among the most 
fallacious, and a good deal worse than those they are intended to supersede.” 
“JT have no wish,” he adds, “ to mislead others by an assertion of knowledge 
which I know no one to possess.” 
Alfred Newton was one of the first naturalists in this country to give in 
his adhesion to the views propounded by Charles Darwin as to the origin of 
species. A few years after the publication of these views he contributed to 
the ‘ Proceedings of the Zoological Society ’ (1863) an interesting confirmation 
and illustration of Darwin’s remarks on the way in which seeds may be 
dispersed by birds, describing the case of a partridge which had been found 
