alternately with tawny brown and black; secondaries and tertiaries,
dusky, barred on the outer webs with reddish white. The upper tail
coverts, which extend over more than half the tail, have the two
outer leathers shorter than the others; under tail coverts, of like length,
reddish brown, indistinctly barred with darker brown, and tipped with
dull white. Legs, toes, and claws, light brown.
The female is rather less in size, rather more red in colour, and
the transverse bars less distinct.
Since this article was wii ten, and wdiile it was on its way to the
press, I have received the melancholy intelligence of the awful death
on the railway, near lletford, of my dear friend whose name I have
mentioned in it, Hugh Edwin Strickland. Little did I think, when
I sat next to him at the dinner on the first day of the meeting of
the British Association at Hull, for which wc had secured the two
adjoining placet, that I should never see him again; as little that a
letter he forwarded to me in the interim would be the last I should
ever receive from him; as little when he spoke of having attended
every, or nearly every previous meeting, that he would never attend
another; and as little when wc wished one another good-bye in his
lodging, where he left me writing, on the last day of the meeting,
but twenty-four hours before his death, that we should never again
meet in this world! Alas! that the words of Professor Sedgwick,
near -whose right hand he sat, and whose place in the chair he had
fitly and worthily occupied from time to time, so eloquently and feelingly
and as it were forebodingly uttered on the afternoon of the
same day in his concluding speech, that possibly some of those then
present might not meet together at the next anniversary, should so
soon and so fatally be fulfilled! My departed, long-valued, and everto
be-lamented friend lost his life literally through his devotion to
science, having gone on the railway line to examine a geological formation;
and sure I am that in every relation of life his loss wiU
never be forgotten, as it can never he repaired. On one only other
occasion hi my life, when another valued friend, W. V. J. Surtees,
was mo;>t unfortunately drowned at Oxford, have I ever had such
a shock as the sudden account of his death. Peace to the memory
of the departed. How little do w e know ' what a day may bring
f o r t h ! '