86 
The Irish Naturalist. 
April, 
the Tripos of 1894. Both were candidates to the scientific 
staff of vScott's first Antarctic Expedition (1901-4) for 
which one alone could be appointed. To the rejected 
applicant fell the consolation of compiling for the use of 
his successful rival the chapter on seals in the Antarctic 
Manual (1901)." One stage was yet to be added to 
complete the parallel. 
In October, Barrett -Hamilton sailed for the Southern 
Ocean, having been appointed as commissioner from the 
Colonial Ofiice and the Natural History Museum to report 
on questions arising out of the indiscriminate slaughter of 
whales in the seas round the Falkland Islands and South 
Georgia. While discharging the duties of this appointment 
on the last-named island he was attacked by pneumonia, 
and died on the 17th of January, 1914. His remains were 
brought home and laid to rest in the churchyard of Dun- 
cannon, Co. Wexford, on Monday, the 2nd of March. 
Of his personal qualities this is scarcely the place to 
speak, but it is not an exaggeration to say that he leaves 
a gap which will ever remain in the hearts of those who 
knew him. His keen interest in sport, agriculture, politics, 
&c., made his circle of acquaintances very wide, even apart 
from his devotion to natural science, on which, of course, 
his correspondence was most extensive. The charm of his 
manner was as strongly brought out in his letters as in his 
conversation, and no one was ever readier to accept a little 
criticism in the best possible spirit, or to indicate where 
full information on a particular subject was to be obtained. 
He had a decided power of interesting popular audiences 
on natural history subjects, as will be remembered by 
those who attended the afternoon lectures he occasionally 
dehvered for the Royal Dublin Society, on subjects that 
ranged from the Seals of the Pribilofs to the Bats of the 
British Isles. 
Of the value of his many scattered zoological' writings 
there may, of course, be two views — especially as regards 
some of the latest, in which his genius for "splitting" 
proved a stumbling-block to a certain school of thought. 
Some of the best known of his papers were written in early 
