OBITUARY NOTICES OF DECEASED MEMBERS. 
Mr. Herbert J. Little. 
Few tasks are so painful to undertake or so difficult to discharge as 
that of writing an obituary notice of a departed friend and fellow- 
worker. During a short official experience of less than three years 
it has fallen to the lot of the present Editor to chronicle in one form 
or another the deaths of no less than ten Members of the Council 
of the Society. He has now to record in the opening pages of a new 
Quarterly Journal the untimely decease of another most valued and 
esteemed Member of Council, Mr. Herbert Little, of Coldham Hall. 
Born on November 17, 1835, at a small hamlet in the Isle of 
Ely, called Edernell, where his relations had occupied a farm for 
nearly half a century, Herbert John Little returned when his 
schooldays were over to the family home to learn farming under his 
father. There he spent the next eight years of his life. He 
inherited from his father a good eye for cattle, and later on his 
judgment was matured by association with his father-in-law, Mr. 
John Brown, of Coldham Hall, who was a notable judge of stock. 
But the science of agriculture seems to have had for him as great 
charms as its practice. He acquired a considerable knowledge of 
agricultural chemistry, whilst meteorology had for him quite a 
fascination. During a period of twenty-five years he regularly 
recorded the rainfall, and he frequently contributed notes on the 
weather to the newspapers. 
At the age of twenty-four Mr. Little became himself the 
occupier of a farm of 500 acres at Wisbech St. Mary's, where he 
had during the first two or three years of his occupation some 
particularly trying experiences with the weather. Seven years 
later he went to Thorpelands, near Northampton, on the estate of 
Lord Overstone, and after five years of farming there he migrated 
to the farm of his father-in-law at Coldham, where the remaining 
eighteen years of his life were passed. 
Mr. Little's vocation as a farmer does not appear, even in difficult 
times, to have wholly engrossed his attention ; and he found many 
additional outlets for his energy and cultivated tastes in the study of 
English literature and music — he had played the piano from an 
early age, and was a performer on, and even a designer of, the 
organ — and in attending farmers' clubs and Chambers of Agriculture, 
reading papers on " Local Taxation," " Education of the Agricul- 
tural Labourer," " Local Dialects," and so forth. 
He became in 1868 a candidate for the post of Secretary and 
Editor of the Royal Agricultural Society, and was one of the seven 
selected candidates who had an interview with the Committee. 
Although he was not chosen for this appointment, the work of the 
" Royal " seems to have had a considerable interest for him, for he 
became a Member in 1870, and in 1871 made his first appearance 
in this Journal with an elaborate and very well written paper 
on the then burning question of Sewage Farming. As the reporting 
