194 



The h'ish Naturalist. 



November, 



debt he owed to his eldest half-brother, Edward, who not 

 only gave him books on natural history, but also made a 

 point of reading them himself, to become a more intelligent 

 helper. From a journal he began to keep at thirteen, and 

 in which notes of natural history observations are frequent, 

 it is plain that plants were his first love," but birds quickly 

 gained a high second place in his affections. His first note 

 to the Zoologist, in 1866, is a well-informed one on the food 

 of the Woodpigeon. It contains the characteristic state- 

 ment that a Woodpigeon shot by him in the previous winter 

 (i.e., when he was sixteen) had 98 beech -nuts in its 

 crop." In a farm so well kept as that of Fassaroe it is not 

 wonderful that his zoological talents were early turned to 

 good account. " When a boy," he records in a later note, 

 '* nearly all my pocket-money was earned by rat -catching, 

 my father allowing me one penny per head, so I soon became 

 expert at the trade, and well acquainted with the habits 

 of the rats." A good deal of miscellaneous information 

 not suggested by the headlines found its way into his early 

 short notes. For instance, the fact that Squirrels were 

 already numerous at Fassaroe in 1867 is incidentally 

 mentioned in a note on " rats eating grapes." 



Prior to entering Trinity College he was taught chiefly 

 by tutors at home, though for about a year he attended 

 a day school at Bray. In 1866 he entered Trinity College, 

 Dublin, where he graduated with honours in 1870 as a 

 Moderator in Experimental and Natural Science. These 

 two subjects were in the following year formed into separate 

 Moderatorship courses, and Barrington was unlucky in 

 taking his degree in the last year in which his favourite study 

 held only a subordinate place. 



In 1875 he was called to the Bar, and went the Leinster 

 Circuit. But he soon found the work of a land valuer far 

 more to his taste than attendance at the Four Courts, and 

 amongst its other advantages it kept him, even in the midst 

 of his professional duties, largely in the open air. 



It was during his undergraduate years that, during 

 some of his visits to the Royal Dublin Society's Museum, 

 he "discovered" — as he afterwards expressed it — '* that 

 there was somebody there who took so great an interest in 



