My task is ended--in many respects a very mournful, yet a very pleasing one; and if there be found but a few readers who derive either pleasure or profit from a perusal of these pages, I shall feel amply rewarded for my trouble. C. G. O. _May 1881._ MEMOIR. “To be able to give one’s name to a bird, or a flower, may seem to many but a poor ambition; and yet, materially considered, it is quite as likely to be perpetuated as to give it to a street or town, and is much more likely to define the tastes and individuality of the giver.”--_Bret Harte._ The saying has seldom been truer of any one than of the writer of the succeeding pages, that “the child is father of the man.” His love of nature generally, and of natural history in all its branches, was one of Frank Oates’s earliest instincts; and to the study of our English wild-birds--their ways and haunts, their comings and their goings--he was especially devoted from boyhood. The pages of Waterton and Buffon, treating of wider fields of study, supplied his imagination at that period with richer food; and the plates of Audubon’s Birds, when access could be had to them, were turned by him with feelings little short of reverence. From his earliest days he had resolved to visit those distant, and, to him, still mysterious lands, where the page of nature was yet to the white man in great part an unread book; and those who, after his death in the full prime of manhood, witnessed the arrival at his English home of his large collections of natural history specimens, brought from the interior of South Africa by the devoted service of a friend, realized strangely how the boy’s ambition had been fulfilled in after life, and felt that, though cut off in the very perfection of his powers, the purpose of his being had not wholly failed. Those even who knew him best were surprised indeed, when these evidences of his work abroad arrived, to see how much he had accomplished in the brief period--a little short of two years--of his absence. As, one after another, the packing-cases were opened, each in its turn afforded to the looker-on some fresh illustration of the untiring determination of the deceased traveller to make the very utmost of his opportunities whilst abroad. The voice that could alone have told the story of those collections, the hand that had brought them thus together, were silent and still in a far distant grave; but an utterance--the more pathetic because it was inaudible--seemed to go forth, unbidden, from those speechless records of devoted work and enterprise, and tell the secret tale of a life in earnest sympathy with nature curtailed,--the hand, as it were, yet warm from its labours.