Abstract
AT the venerable age of eighty-four years this well-known British naturalist has passed away, and it would be an injustice to his memory not to recall in these pages the effect of his life-work on the zoology of this country. He seems to have inherited his natural history tastes from his father, who was in business in Newcastle in the early part of the century, but was apparently devoted to natural history pursuits; and, in company with other kindred spirits, was intent on working up the natural history of Newcastle and the immediate neighbourhood. Unfortunately the father died at the early age of forty-three, in September 1812, leaving a widow and six children, of whom the eldest was only eight years of age. Mrs. Hancock, however, carefully preserved the collections which her husband had formed, and it was. doubtless due to her affectionate interest that three of her children—Albany, John, and Mary—pursued the study of natural history with such success. The subject of this notice, John Hancock, seems to have turned his attention to ornithology in particular, and as early as 1826 he commenced the study of the artistic mounting of animals, which, as Mr. Bowdler Sharpe has said, has made John Hancock's name a password wherever the art of taxidermy is mentioned. Those who remember the celebrated groups of mounted animals which Mr. Hancock sent to the Great Exhibition of 1851, will testify to the revulsion of feeling which his beautiful work created, and every real naturalist felt in his heart that in this way alone could art and nature be combined in a Museum, and the public properly instructed in a due realization of the beauty and symmetry of form which animals possess in nature—beauties which are not reproduced in a Museum gallery once in a hundred times. That Hancock's influence should have been so little felt by the authorities of the British Museum is a reflection upon the officers of this institution, who ought to have utilized the genius of their countryman in making the collection of British animals in the National Museum a model for all nations to envy and copy. Anyone who knew John Hancock, his untiring energy and his unassuming amiability, will vouch for the fact that, if the British Museum had wished to have a collection of native birds naturally mounted, and worthy of this institution, he would have been only too delighted to aid in the achievement of such a task. As it is, the Museum of his native town, which really seems to have appreciated his genius, possesses a collection of birds of which any nation might be proud, and now that he is gone, those Museums (like the one at Leicester, for instance) which have series of birds mounted by this true lover and connoisseur of birds in nature, are to be congratulated. Of late years it is true that our National Museum has trodden the path indicated by Hancock, and a vast improvement in its taxidermy has been the result; but it will be a long time before any Museum can show such a beautiful series of birds as that which John Hancock has mounted for the Museum of his native town. An excellent biography of this esteemed naturalist has been published in the Newcastle Daily Chronicle of October 13.
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John Hancock. Nature 42, 616 (1890). https://doi.org/10.1038/042616b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/042616b0