Vlll 



PREFACE. 



architecture that this country can shew), he had bought 

 a few years before, and there ended his days in 1719. 



At a very early age Mr. Powys manifested that 

 affection for animals which intensified as time went on, 

 and this shewed itself in the way usual among school- 

 boys, so that at Harrow, whither he was sent, he was 

 not only a keen collector of zoological specimens, but 

 even kept a small menagerie, which (as he himself 

 told me) brought him more than once into trouble with 

 his masters. From Harrow was written his earliest 

 published note (Zoologist, page 2775), and there he 

 stayed until 1850, in which year he was placed with a 

 tutor at Geneva, with the result that he was the first 

 Englishman to give any information (op. cit. page 2968) 

 as to the breeding of the Rose-coloured Starling, though, 

 from what we now know, the instances of which he was 

 told by the Curator of the Museum at that place were 

 certainly abnormal. Early in May 1851 he left 

 Switzerland, and was entered at Christchurch, where he 

 speedily established a larger menagerie, which a few 

 months later comprised examples of nearly a dozen 

 species of Birds of Prey, beside other animals. He 

 continued contributing notes to ' The Zoologist,' and it 

 was one of these that, in 1852, led to our correspond- 

 ence, which, though slackening at times, w T as kept up 

 until his death. As became his youth, he was sanguine, 

 and, as became his nature, unsuspicious; it must there- 

 fore not be imputed as a fault to him, that then, and 

 even later, he accepted without hesitation much that 



