Page:Auk Volume 13-1896.djvu/35

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THE AUK:

A QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF

ORNITHOLOGY.


VOL. XIII.

January, 1896.

NO. I.


IN MEMORIAM: GEORGE NEWBOLD LAWRENCE[1]

Born, 20th Oct., 1806. Died, 17th Jan., 1895.

by D.G. Elliot, F. R. S. E.

"To him who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language,"

and none can understand her rythmic lines so well as he who has taken the denizens of the forest and the fields into intimate fellowship with himself, and gained them for his own familiar friends. With such a one Nature holds especial converse, and unfolds to him the secrets hidden from all ordinary eyes. The way of a serpent on a rock, and of an eagle in the air, the wisest of men confessed he was unable to understand, and yet by many, in the closing years of this nineteenth century, profiting by their own, and the labors of those who have preceded them, in the close and earnest study of Nature's laws and methods, much more intricate and obtruse problems than those which perplexed the King of Israel have been clearly comprehended. In that branch of science which relates to the living things of earth, and

  1. An address delivered at the Thirteenth Congress of the American Ornithologists' Union, at Washington, D.C., Nov. 12, 1895.