Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 5 (1901).djvu/175

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the well-known and widely-respected Naturalist-dealer, was the son of Mr. Isaac Abrahams, of Leeds, in which town he was born on June 26th, 1839. When only sixteen years old he visited Victoria as one of the pioneers of the gold-mining industry of the Bendigo and Ballarat goldfields, and was the owner of the first miner's right to dig for gold. It therefore was not until his return to England in 1861 and his succession shortly afterwards to the business of his father-in-law, Moses Nathan, that Mr. Abrahams commenced his researches into the minute and yet important characters, the knowledge of which raised him far above the level of the ordinary bird-dealer.

Although almost entirely self-taught, it is no exaggeration to say that in the sexing of birds no man was his equal; he could unhesitatingly pick out a pair of birds of any imported species with such accuracy that, under favourable conditions, nesting would be almost a certainty; his eye became so trained to the differences of male and female in birds of identical plumage that, in ninety-nine out of a hundred cases, he would sex them at a glance. In the case of the Parrots, however, this was not always possible; but having devoted five years to the preparation of skulls from birds of which he had ascertained the sex by dissection, he accumulated such a mass of material that he was enabled to discover a well-defined constant sexual distinction, enabling him at all times to tell the sex of a Parrot whilst apparently only tickling its face. Not satisfied with this structural difference alone, which was not always pleasant to ascertain in the case of vicious and spiteful birds, this indefatigable student proceeded to note the colour of the irides, and ascertained that, in the genus Chrysotis at any rate, the iris in the female was decidedly paler than that of the male. The sexes of Love-birds and Budjerigars, apart from colour-differences, he usually ascer-