Page:Nests and eggs of Australian birds 1901.djvu/22

 original information, not to mention thrilling adventure, most mysteriously disappeared. However, his son, Mr. C. A. White, is now endeavouring from personal notes and private letters to publish a book on the last adventurous trip.

On account of Mr. White's devotion as a field ornithologist and collector, and before all the birds of this great Island Continent have been discovered and named, it is hoped that some author will dedicate one species at least to his memory.

There have also been distinguished foreign field collectors to our shores, namely:—Dr. Carl Lumholtz, whose interesting bird notes are recorded in the account of his travels "Among Cannibals in Northern Queensland;" and Dr. Knut Dahl (both Norwegians), who more recently visited the North-west and Northern Territory.

I shall conclude my "cloud of witnesses" by naming two early collectors, who met premature deaths at the hands of treacherous natives: Johnson Drummond (already mentioned under Gould), who was killed in Western Australia; and F. Strange, of Sydney, who was murdered by the aborigines in the Wide Bay district, Queensland, about July, 1846. He was one of Gould's collectors, and had just returned from Europe by a vessel called the "Vimiera." An account of his tragic death appeared in the "Sydney Homing Herald."

Should I have overlooked names of other worthy forerunners in the field, such omissions must be regarded as purely unintentional on my part, or as caused by the absence of the necessary data; while of my own immediate contemporaries I have nothing to say. Time alone, that wondrous adjuster of relative merits and demerits, will impartially judge us all.

My votes of thanks. They are too numerous, and beyond the scope of this introduction to be all enumerated, and it would be invidious even to mention some of the many persons who have aided my work by signal services in the field. But as the names of collectors and others appear throughout this book, I hope that will be sufficient acknowledgment for the respective notes or specimens they have been so good as to supply me with.

I take this opportunity, however, of expressing my indebtedness to the proprietors of "The Australasian" for so persistently publishing for many years my articles on "Some Australian Birds." Of course these articles, as they must necessarily have been, were merely sketches, but sketches, nevertheless, which have done a great deal to popularize