XIX 



made until within a short period of his death, so that in the collection 

 recently acquired by the British Museum, there were upwards of five 

 thousand examples of birds of this family. 



Shortly after the completion of the " Humming Birds," Gould com- 

 menced his work on the " Birds of Great Britain," which he affirmed 

 had never been properly illustrated. Whatever may be other opinions 

 upon this point, it is certain that Gould's five volumes upon this sub- 

 ject, which were completed in 1873, added vastly to our knowledge 

 upon many points, besides giving us the most complete set of pictures 

 of our native birds yet issued. Special pains were bestowed on the 

 plates of this work, which may in some cases, perhaps, be said to be 

 slightly overcoloured, but the natural attitudes of the various species, 

 and the selection of appropriate surroundings, have never been sur- 

 passed in any work of natural history. 



Besides the works already specially mentioned, Gould issued other 

 folio volumes, such as the " Monograph of the Odontophorina?," and 

 second editions of the " Toucans " and " Trogons," the whole series 

 forming altogether forty-one folio volumes, illustrated by 2999 plates, a 

 performance quite unrivalled in any other branch of literature. Gould 

 was also the author of upwards of 300 memoirs and papers published 

 in the " Proceedings of the Zoological Society," and in other 

 periodicals. For the last five or six years of his life, Gould was in 

 failing health. Though suffering from a tedious and painful malady, 

 he never ceased to work, and even within a few months of his death 

 had planned a new monograph, and issued the first part of it. Gould 

 died on the 3rd of February, 1881, in his seventy- seventh year, in his 

 house in Charlotte Street, near the British Museum, where he had 

 lived for the last twenty years of his life. His collection of birds has 

 passed, to the great satisfaction of all naturalists, into the collection of 

 the British Museum. Gould was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society 

 in 1813, and was for many years an active Member of Council and 

 Vice-President of the Society with which he had become originally 

 connected in the humble capacity of bird stuff er. — P. L. S. 



Robekt Mallet was born in Dublin on the 3rd June, 1810, and 

 died in London on the 5th November, 1881. He was the son of 

 Mr. John Mallet, well-known as an ironfounder in the city of Dublin. 

 He entered Trinity College in 1826 and graduated in Arts in 1830. He 

 became a member of the Royal Irish Academy in 1832, of the Society 

 of Civil Engineers of Ireland in 1836, and of the Chamber of Com- 

 merce of Dublin in 1837, and afterwards became an Associate and 

 Member of the Institution of Civil Engineers of England in 1839 and 

 1842. 



He obtained, in 1841, the "Walker Premium from the Institution of 

 Civil Engineers for raising the roof of St. George's Church, Dublin. 



