It is with deep regret that we record the death
on Tuesday of Mr. C. J. Cornish, the well-known writer on natural history and country sports and pastimes, whose delightful articles in the Spectator have for the past fifteen years entertained and informed our readers. It would not be fitting for us to praise too strongly Mr. Cornish's literary work, but we may perhaps be allowed to refer to the naturalness and kindliness of his style, and the eager interest in the whole out-of-door world which inspired everything he wrote. Though he wrote so much, he never repeated himself, and never did conventional work. He could not have been dull, or pompous, or obscure even if he had tried. He was not, or at any rate would not allow himself to be called, a scientific zoologist, but in spite of that his knowledge of animal life was very great, and his sympathy with birds, beasts, fishes, and insects admirably wide. He was, as it were, an interpreter to the unscientific and unlearned public of natural history in the widest sense. As for his sympathy, if he wrote of butterflies he made you feel that a butterfly was a real personage with a home and domestic habits, and not merely a painted nothing of the air. Mr. Cornish as a man possessed a singularly kindly and affectionate nature. He loved children and understood them, and they loved him. It was this gift of sympathy for the young that made him a most successful and efficient schoolmaster, for up till the moment when his last illness seized him he was one of the assistant. masters at St. Paul's School. He inspired his pupils with some- thing of his own energy and love of work. Mr. Cornish was sprung from an old and distinguished family long connected with Devon- shire and Cornwall, and in him the love of natural history was hereditary. For example, his great-grandfather in the middle of the eighteenth century wrote a book on the culture and preservation of salmon and other fish in the Devonshire rivers, in which many of Frank Buckland's suggestions are forestalled by nearly a century. Mr. Cornish had many friends who will feel his loss profoundly, but none will regret him more than his colleagues on the Spectator.
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