plete description . . . nor does the book 
contain anything like full biographies of 
each species. . . . Full accounts of the lives 
of the birds are to be found in many excel- 
lent books . . . which may be used to supple- 
ment this Guide. 
Hoffmann’s recognition of the impor- 
tance of field observations grew out of a 
boyhood of birding. Born in Stock- 
bridge, Massachusetts, in 1870, he was 
such an expert birder as a boy that when 
the English poet Matthew Arnold came 
to town and wanted the best bird 
watcher available to take him walking in 
the Berkshires, the townfolk summoned 
thirteen-year-old Ralph. 
Hoffmann graduated from Harvard 
at twenty, married at twenty-three, and 
spent most of his life as a teacher, not a 
scientist. Not until the last decade of his 
life, when he was summoned to the 
directorship of the Santa Barbara Mu- 
seum of Natural History, did he leave 
schoolteaching. 
He had no formal training in ornithol- 
ogy or botany, and although he became 
an expert in both fields, he retained his 
amateur status. As a Latin teacher, he 
would have been pleased to point out the 
root of the word amateur — amator, 
Latin for “lover.” Hoffmann brought an 
amateur’s excitement and joy to his 
work, reflected in every line he wrote. 
He came to the classics naturally: his 
father, Ferdinand Hoffmann, was a dis- 
tinguished Latin and Greek scholar who 
ran a boys’ boarding school in Stock- 
bridge. While working on Birds of New 
England , Ralph supported his wife and 
three children by teaching Latin at 
Brown and Nichols School in Cam- 
bridge. In 1909 an offer came for the 
headmastership of the Country Day 
School for Boys in Kansas City. Under 
his direction the school grew from a 
gathering of eighteen boys in an old 
country homestead into a preparatory 
school with eighty-five students. 
In 1919, Hoffmann accepted a post at 
the Cate School for Boys in Santa Bar- 
bara. The flora and fauna of California 
were terra incognita and an exciting 
challenge. He responded by beginning, 
almost immediately, the research that 
culminated eight years later in Birds of 
the Pacific States. 
His diaries chronicle progress on the 
project from the start on April 3, 
1921 — “Started notes for Cal guide”— 
to the finish on June 2, 1927 — “G. [Ger- 
trude, his wife] brought a copy of The 
Book home from town.” Hoffmann 
comes alive in the entries between. Bird 
notes appear throughout: the first pileo- 
lated (Wilson’s) warbler of the spring; 
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