258 
A BIBLIOGRAPHY OP 
[gurney 
the borders of Epping Forest, where he seems to have made 
the acquaintance of Henry Doubleday, and first commenced 
a natural history collection. Thence he went to the Friends’ 
School at Tottenham, at which period he was first introduced 
to William Yarrell. On leaving school, being then about 
seventeen years old, he entered the banking business at 
Norwich, in which his family had been long engaged. 
Gurney’s earliest published communications seem to have 
been notes on Norfolk birds in the Annals and Magazine of 
Natural History for March and June 1842 ; although four 
years previously he had commenced keeping a journal of 
observations. In the next year the Zoologist was established, 
and to this he became a frequent contributor, publishing in 
the volume for 1846 , with the aid of Mr. W. It. Fisher, “ An 
Account of Birds found in Norfolk,” which they supple- 
mented with a series of notes in the 1847 and 1848 volumes. 
When the scheme for founding the Ibis was proposed, he 
entered warmly into it, and promised to defray the cost of 
a plate for each number of the new journal, in addition to 
the two plates for which allowance was made in the original 
estimate, only stipulating that the subject of each plate that 
he presented should be a u Bird of Prey ” — for he had 
already made great progress in forming the now vast and 
celebrated collection of “ Baptores ” in the Norwich Museum. 
In 1864 he published Part I. of his Descriptive Catalogue of 
this collection, and he edited in 1872 The Birds of Damara 
Land from the papers of his friend Charles John Andersson. 
In his knowledge of the Accipitres and Striges he stood 
pre-eminent. A great part of his information regarding the 
first of these groups he contributed to the Ibis between 1875 
and 1882 , in a series of Notes on the first volume of the 
Catalogue of Birds in the British Museum , and on its con- 
clusion he brought out a List of Diurnal Birds of Prey , with 
References and Annotations (cf. Ibis, 1884 , p. 456 ), which is 
indispensable to all students of these birds. It is stated 
that his total contributions to the volumes of the Ibis number 
no less than 140 . 
