hunt] 
BRITISH ORNITHOLOGY 
305 
course of the last three years I have had five or six specimens 
of this rare and beautiful bird through my hands.” Mr. 
Southwell, indeed, classes him with Butcher, Hall, and John 
Smith as a “ professional.” He was also a collector, as he 
mentions his collection in the work just cited under “ Pere- 
grine,” and at the end of the List adds a note of his “ large 
collection ” offered for sale. His British Ornithology (left 
unfinished, the text stopping short in the middle of a sentence) 
is now of the greatest rarity. In a note in one of the late 
Professor Newton’s copies (now in the Zoological Museum 
at Cambridge) occurs this remark : “ Joseph Clarke of 
Saffron Walden (25/5/81) tells me he believes this book was 
intended to be in 6 vols. as he has a plate of a Gull which 
is marked in pencil c for Yol. 6/ Also that either Griffin or 
Hunt himself told him that Archdeacon Coxe wrote the text 
for Hunt.” This attribution of the text to R. C. Coxe, who 
was born in 1800, and would therefore have only been a 
schoolboy of fifteen when the work first appeared, is mani- 
festly absurd. The more so as Mr. Grand informs us that 
his grandfather was always beforehand with the text, but was 
delayed by the trouble and expense of producing the plates. 
Be this, however, as it may, John Hunt undoubtedly 
supplied the “ List of Birds ” to the General History of 
Norfolk , vol. i. p. lviii, published in 1829, and was also a 
correspondent of Messrs. Sheppard and Whitear, the compilers 
of the “ Catalogue of the Norfolk and Suffolk Birds ” in the 
Trans. Linn. Soc. vol. xv. pt. i., 1826. 1 
*1815 [-22]. British | Ornithology ; | containing Portraits of all the | 
British Birds, | including those of Foreign Origin, | which have 
become domesticated ; | Drawn, Engraved & Coloured | after 
Nature, | by | J. Hunt, | with descriptions compiled from the | 
works of the most | Esteemed Naturalists, | & arranged accord- 
ing to the | Linnean Classification. | Vol. I. [II., III.]. | Inscribed 
by Permission | To Sir J. E. Smith, M.D., E.B.S., | and President 
1 The figure of the Sedge Warbler in Hunt’s British Ornithology was undoubtedly- 
taken from a specimen of Acrocephalus aquations (the Aquatic Warbler). Cf. Trans. 
Norf. and Norw. Nat. Soc., 1871-72, p. 62; and Harting’s Handbook of British Birds 
(1901), p. 355. The Red-crested Pochard was first recorded as a British bird by 
Hunt. Cf. Vol. II. pp. 333. 
X 
