94 CONSERVATOR OF SURGEONS’ MUSEUM [oh. rv. 
wanderings which did not draw warmth of 
sympathy from his kindly heart; and there are 
many passages in his book on British birds, which, 
for picturesque beauty, poetic feeling, or tender 
sympathy with Nature, and every living creature that 
came under his observation, can scarcely be sur¬ 
passed. Yet he never allowed his sympathetic 
feeling, or his appreciation of the picturesque to 
interfere with his work as a scientific ornithologist. 
To learn the facts about the habits and lives of 
living birds was the main object of his many 
wanderings; and his power of imagination and 
sympathetic susceptibility, in place of hindering, 
helped much, in his case, to the readier and clearer 
perception of those facts, and to his capacity xor 
making them more vividly and attractively apparent 
to others—to the non-scientific as well as to the 
scientific. 
There is another interesting feature of Mac- 
Gillivray’s mind, which betrays itself in many 
passages of his “ great work/’ as well as in his 
other works—that is an ever-present sense of the 
deep mystery of Nature and of the limits of his 
power of insight, however much he had been able 
to see farther than others of his generation. He 
was intensely worshipful at Nature’s shrine—all his 
best thought and feeling often rising into reverential 
awe, and his heart overflowing with gratitude and 
thankfulness to the Author of all that beauty and 
glory, which constituted for him its supreme and 
abiding interest. 
