84 
The hish Natu?alist. 
April, 
habits of these animals can now afford to neglect his 
remarkable record. ^ 
During the intervals of absence permitted him by the 
Seals when they quitted their breeding-resorts, Barrett - 
Hamilton visited Japan, Kamchatka, and various islands 
of the North Pacific, besides visiting Egypt on one of his 
journeys home. The results of these excursions are 
scattered through many journals, for mammals, birds, 
fishes, and a few insects, as well as plants, formed some of 
the subjects dealt with, and some observations on the 
Salmonidae in Kamchatka (where he also made out a new 
species of Nutcracker) Nucifraga kamchatkensis) , suggested 
to his mind a theory as to the origin of secondary sexual 
characters,^ of which he never afterwards quite lost sight. 
In the Ghizeh museum he inspected what is probably the 
oldest specimen of ornithological portraiture in the world — 
the Maydoom fresco, with its figures of six geese, the 
inspection of which by a competent eye had been pro- 
nounced by Professor Newton in his Dictionary of Birds3 
to be a much-needed desideratum. The result of Barrett- 
Hamilton's examination of them appeared in the IhisA 
After three years devoted to critical — and, indeed, 
strenuous — work on European mammals, he was again 
called from home by the South African War, in which he 
served (190 1-2) as Captain of the 5th Royal Irish Rifles. 
South Africa had an important influence on the remainder 
of his life, for after the war he married, in 1903, Maude, 
the only daughter of F. S. Eland, of Ravenshill, 
Transvaal. 
For the next ten years (1903-13) he lived quietly at 
Kilmanock, devoting all the time that the busy life of an 
enterprising agriculturist allowed him to the preparation 
of his work on British Mammals — a work which he had 
long had in contemplation, and of which an early hint had 
1 See Natural Science, 1899, pp. 17-41. 
2 See Proc. Camh. Phil. Soc, 1900, p. 279. 
^ Introd., p. 2. 
* 1897, P- 484- 
