A few words as to myself and my present association with M. Herman. From my earliest childhood I have had a passionate love for birds and flowers. I remember looking with wondering delight on the velvety upturned faces of the variously tinted pansies that bordered the paths leading up to the door of a certain farmhouse where we stayed much in the summer-time, when I was just four years old,--wonder because our mother told us that God’s finger painted them and I used to think that He did it whilst we slept. Our father gave us prizes for the one who could collect the greatest number of wild flowers and knew most about the trees. In the town I collected bird pictures, nursed an occasional wounded sparrow, kept my eyes open generally, and read much of William and Mary Howitt. Then came some years of school life--the last two of these in Germany, where the study of natural history has always received more attention than has hitherto been the case with us in England, and these were followed by a few years at home on the moorlands of Staffordshire. Later I had thirteen years of wandering in different parts of the Pacific--New Zealand, Tahiti, Hawaii, California, all of which strengthened my love of out-door life; and although my scientific knowledge was small, my acquaintance with nature and my love of nature have been ever growing. As years advanced, and I was no longer able to go so far afield, it has been a great pleasure to me to collaborate with other naturalists--more than one of these--who, with greater opportunities for the practical observation of birds have combined scientific research. I have been glad to act as henchwoman to such--and to be, as it were, the little bird that in its playful and circling way follows the flight of the greater bird in the heavens. And as I edited--with much gain to my own knowledge--the records of observations of the working naturalist styled “A Son of the Marshes,” so I am glad also to be able to present to our English readers these chapters on the Man and the Bird, and their relative significance in the great field of agriculture. I visited M. and Madame Herman at their home in the beautiful Hungarian valley of Lillafüred, where his summers are spent in the very heart of nature; and I learned and saw much with him there. He had lived as a boy among these mountains and valleys--his father having been the leading physician in the district. There, he had scoured the woods over which the Snake or Short-toed Eagle circled, climbed up to the Peregrine Falcon’s nest, and boated on the lovely little lake, watching the movements of the Osprey. But indeed his whole life has been devoted to the study of nature, and the fauna of his Country, and his many published writings have had a very large circulation there, as well as in Germany.