116 
president’s address. 
what little they do is chiefly confined to the ornithology of their 
own. country. In this they arc by no means peculiar. Every 
nation has its peculiarities, and one of the peculiarities of 
Englishmen is that they are apt to take a narrow, insular view 
of most questions ; their knowledge is insular, their sympathies 
are insular, and consequently their studies are insular. Gurney 
was one of the exceptions that prove the rule. By a curious 
accident his attention was early drawn to the birds of prey found 
in other countries than our little archipelago, and the birds of prey 
being a cosmopolitan group, Gurney’s ornithological sympathies 
became more or less cosmopolitan. That they were not confined 
to foreign birds of prey his interest in South African birds 
abundantly shows. He edited Andersson’s * Birds of Damara 
Land,’ and wrote many articles in the ‘Ibis’ on the collections 
made by Mr. Ayres in Natal and the Transvaal. Further, ho 
presented to the Museum at King’s Lynn, which borough ho 
represented in parliament for more than ten years, a fine collection 
of birds made in the islands of the Malay Archipelago by the 
celebrated naturalist Wallace. 
Gurney’s reputation as an ornithologist rests upon a series of 
articles contributed to the ‘Ibis,’ entitled “Notes on a Catalogue 
of the Accipitres in the British Museum by B. Bowdler Sharpe.” 
They form an exhaustive review of the entire work, which deals 
with 377 species, and they occupy as many pages as the work 
itself. 
These voluminous notes were followed in 1884 by a List of the 
Diurnal Birds of Prey with Deferences and Annotations, also a 
Becord of specimens preserved in the Norfolk and Norwich 
Museum, a small volume of about two hundred pages. 
It is impossible to glance over all this literature, and to test its 
value from time to time by reference to various difficult points as 
they crop up in the investigations of the birds of prey of various 
countries, without a feeling of astonishment at the vast knowledge 
which it displays, and the amount of careful, patient, and pains- 
taking labour which must have been expended in its acquirement. 
It represents an amount of honest hard work, and contrasts very 
