Note 1 — Chapter I

The name of Thomas Bewick is to all book-collectors “familiar in their mouths as household words,” and we rarely read the account of the dispersal of any large library or the choice collection of some bibliophile without finding that it contained a choice edition of Bewick’s “quadrupeds” or “birds”—a “lot” that always calls for a keen competition. It is interesting to know that the book we have named above considerably influenced him, and in no slight degree led to the production of the works that will always remain his monument, for we find him writing to a friend of his—“From my first reading, when a boy at school, a sixpenny history of birds and beasts, and then a wretched composition called the ‘History of Three Hundred Animals,’ to the time I became acquainted with works of natural history written for the perusal of men, I was never without the design of attempting something of this kind myself.” Back