April, 1914. 
The Irish Naturalist 
81 
MAJOR G. E. H. BARRETT-HAMILTON, 
B.A. (CANTAB.), F.Z.S., M.R.I.A. 
It is difficult to contemplate a more severe loss than 
that which has befallen both Irish and British zoology 
through the wholly unexpected death of Major G. E. H. 
Barrett -Hamilton, of Kilmanock, Co. Wexford, which 
took place in South Georgia Island, on the 17th of last 
January. The best and most important fruits of his long 
application to the study of Mammals were only beginning 
to appear, and a work which should have marked an epoch 
in British vertebrate zoology has been reduced to the 
dimensions of a fragment. Though only forty-two (the 
same age that proved fatal last year to Dr. N. H. Alcock) 
Barrett -Hamilton had contributed enormously by his 
scattered writings to the knowledge possessed on this 
subject by the scientific world ; but those who were looking 
forward to a collected presentation of this knowledge in 
the popular form that was promised must feel with peculiar 
keenness the blow of the gifted author's death. 
Irish by parentage, but born in India in 1871, Gerald 
Edwin Hamilton Barrett was three years old when his 
parents settled at Kilmanock, which was thenceforth to 
be his home. His father, Captain Samuel Barrett (who 
assumed the additional name of Hamilton in 1887) was a 
son of Hill Hamilton Barrett, of Dublin, and of Sarah, 
daughter of William Hutcheson, of Woodside, Armagh. 
His mother was Laura, daughter of Childers H. Thompson, 
of The Mount, York. 
So strong was his early love for nature that bird and 
flower notes had to be made for him before he was able to 
write ; and a diary of natural history observations in his 
own handwriting was begun before he was ten. 
In 1885 he went to Harrow School, where his house- 
master was the late Dr. R. Bosworth Smith, an enthusi- 
astic ornithologist and a great encourager of natural history 
in the boys under his charge. With him young Barrett - 
Hamilton formed a lasting friendship, and correspondence 
between them only ceased with Dr. Smith's death in 1908. 
