1979 OBITUARIES 369

OBITUARIES

REV. EDWARD ALLWORTHY ARMSTRONG

Edward Armstrong (who died last December aged 78) was the most recent in a long series of famous parson-naturalists, which included, of course, John Ray in the seventeenth century and Gilbert White in the eighteenth. He was a naturalist from his earliest years and showed always a combination of scientific detachment and deep artistic and spiritual involvement. His religious faith and his passion for the beauty of nature were basic to his whole character, and it is not possible to separate one from the other. As a child he realized the wonder of nature and concluded that even a small boy could find out things which grown-ups did not know. The world to him was full of wonderful, interesting and beautiful things waiting to be discovered and enjoyed. As he said later, ‘Our life is impoverished if we do not cherish and cultivate the gift with which, as children, we were endowed-the gift of wonder-infinitely valuable in itself, but also to be cherished because it is the foundation of worship. The appreciation of nature leads to wonder, and wonder to worship.’

Armstrong graduated M.A. in the Queen’s University of his native Belfast, acquiring thereby a background training in philosophy and psychology. As a candidate for Holy Orders he then entered Ridley Hall, Cambridge, for two years theological training. As a priest he was charged with the care cf souls in such varied places as Hong Kong, Ipswich, Doncaster, Leeds and, finally, for 23 years at St Mark’s Church in Cambridge. But he was able to combine a patient and faithful ministry with an astonishing output of observation and writing in natural history. From the beginning his work revealed dis- tinguished literary style. His first book Birds of thegrey wind combines, in an unique way, a poetic appreciation of the scenery, life and folklore of his beloved Ireland, with an exact and scientific attitude towards its bird-life. So remarkable is the book that it received the award of the Burroughs Medal from the U.S.A.-so far as I know, the only occasion this distinction has been achieved by a non-American.

His first major work, Bird display: an introduction to the study of bird psychology (1942, Cambridge U.P.), was an extraordinary achievement for its time, in that it ante- dated the establishment of ethology as a distinct scientific discipline in this country, by nearly ten years. Its impact was partly due to a friendship (shared with H. Eliot Howard) with the famous physiologist Dr F. H. A. Marshall, FRS, of Christ’s College, Cambridge, who was the pioneer in unravelling the effects on behaviour (and particularly on display) of hormones secreted by the anterior pituitary. The book had a key influence on a number of biologists and ornithologists, and Armstrong himself was active in what one may call the foundation of the new discipline of ethology in this country. He thus took part in an international conference (organized by the Society for Experimental Biology) in Cambridge in 1949. To this conference he contributed a well known paper, The nature and function of displacement activities, which was published in full in Physiological mechanisms in animal behaviour (1950, Cambridge U.P.). I am sure that a number of biologists of that time were surprised to learn that Armstrong was in fact ‘an amateur’- indeed I remember Julian Huxley telephoning me shortly after the publication of Bird display to express his enthusiasm for the book, assuming that the author was one of the bright examples of my research group in Cambridge! Bird displuy was re-issued in a revised and enlarged edition as Bird display and behmiour in 1947 (Lindsay Drummond) and re-issued in U.S.A. by Dover Publications in 1965.

In 1943 Armstrong commenced the intensive study of a bird which will always be associated with his name-the Wren Troglodytes troglodytes. He was enabled to undertake

370 OBITUARIES IBIS 121

this study through having continued access over many years to the Adam’s Road Bird Sanctuary in Cambridge (the ‘\Vren \Vood’ of the book) where he had the greater part of the resident population of \Vrens colour-ringed throughout the period of his study. This meticulous and unrelenting work, which included the use of automatic nest-visit recorders, enabled him to produce in 1955 the S e w Yaturalist monograph, The W r e n (Collins) of over 300 pages. This became a classic as one of the best known scientific studies of a single British bird species. The final conclusion of this great study saw the light only last year (1977) in the form of a massive review. Behavioural adaptations of the \\‘ren (Troglodytes troglodytes), (Biological Reviews 52: 235-294), written jointly with Dr H. E. Whitehouse.

In 1963 Armstrong published another niajor contribution to ornithology, The study of Inrd song (Oxford L.P.). Although he was fully informed about the developments (first published about five years earlier) in the study of vocalizations by means of the sound spectrograph, the main objective cf his 1963 book was to summarize knowledge previous to the development of this new technique. It is an indispensible work of reference of particular value in that it emphasizes the necessity, when interpreting the nature of a bird’s utterance, of taking into account characteristics such as the nature of the pair bond, coloration, foraging and other adaptations. An en!arged edition was produced in U.S.A. in 1073 (Dover Publications).

In 1969 he produced an original and beautiful essay, Aspects of the evolution of man’s appwciation of bird song (see Bird cocalizations: their relation to current problems in biology & psychology, R. A. Hinde (ed.), Cambridge U.P.). This essay could have been written t ~ > no other ornithologist in the world, for it brings together, in a delightful and readable style, all the various constituents of his basic approach to the beauty of nature, combined with his wide reading in poetry, aesthetics, anthropology and pre-history. A bird book ‘with a difference’ in his The folklore of birds: an enquiry into the origin and distribution o j sonw magico-religious traditions (1958, Collins New Xaturalist Series). Although not an ornithological work as such, it is of very wide interest in that it deals with topics which never, so far as I am aware, have been brought together in any other book. (A second edition, revised and estensively enlarged, was issued in the U.S.A. in 1970 by Dover Puhlications). Amongst its fourteen chapters we find a full discussion of the prehistoric background of bird folklore, a discussion of the ‘Rain Goose’ (ch. 4) and an account of the ‘birds of doom and deluge’ (the Raven), ‘night’s black agents’ (owls) and ‘firebirds, etc.’ (ch. 10). Here again we have a book which is unique in flavour, scope and scholarship.

Anyone thoroughly familiar with Edward’s vast erudition and an understanding of the basis of his approach to the natural world could have surmized that sooner or later the life of St Francis of Assisi would become a major pre-occupation with him. So it came about that in 1973 he produced St Francis, nature mystic: The derivation and s(qnifcance of the nature stories in the Franciscan legend (Los Angeles, Berkeley and London: Calif. Univ. Press). The author pointed out that it was widely and commonly held that St Francis inaugurated a new outlook on nature in the West, an outlook which was soon to be expressed in Christian art. Armstrong showed that behind all this there was a long history, in that there was a rich corpus of Christian nature legend centuries before St Francis was born-largely Celtic or Eastern in origin, and brought to Europe by Irish pilgrims and missionaries. He argued that both the Franciscan rule and the animal stories which gathered around the saint are deeply indebted to these Celtic sources; and that however genuine the saint’s appreciation of nature, his knowledge of it was minimal. This book had a very thorough and favourable review in the Times Literary Supplement (April 1974) from which I quote the following:

‘The author is one of the rare theologians who is also an experienced ornithologist. He can therefore check the literary tradition by his knowledge of bird and animal behaviour-of which the hagiographers knew so little that St Francis is said to have

1979 OBITUARIES 371

PLATE 14. REV. E. A. ARMBTRONG.

enjoined the brethren to spread grain for the Swallows at Christmas! The historian by himself cannot do this; he needs the help of the biologist and ethologist. Some of the stories in the familiar form were derived from written collections of anecdotes. As Armstrong remarks, “The wolf of Gubbio is a creature out of books, not out of the woods.”) The reviewer concludes, ‘. . . an altogether delightful book, based on solid learning, wide sympathy and enriched by well chosen illustrations. Because of the author’s many sided interests it may fairly be claimed as breaking new ground.’

Finally, turning away from nature as such, we have in 1946 Shakespeare’s imagination: A study of the psychology of association and inspiration. This book started as an attempt to find out how good a naturalist Shakespeare in fact was. The conclusion was inevitable- he was no naturalist at all! The author found however that Shakespeare’s use of metaphors or examples reveals an astonishing system of ‘image clusters’ which recur again and again throughout his works. The book originally published by Lindsay Drummond (1946) was subsequently taken over by the University of Nebraska Press and issued in 1963 and is again (hardback) due in 1980. I t has had a wide success in U.S.A., and in this country, Sir Alec Guinness, described it as ‘The most stimulating, the most pleasing, and the most satisfactory book on Shakespeare that I have ever read’.

Surely the mould was broken after Edward’s appearance in this world. But let us hope that he was wrong in thinking that he himself was the last of a long series of famous parson-naturalists. Is it too much to hope that his life and work will be an inspiration to other learned clerics, endowed with a similar sympathy, understanding and delight in the natural world?

The award of the John Burrough’s Medal to Armstrong in 1941 has been mentioned above. Apart from this he was created M.A. honoris causa by Cambridge University and became a member of Jesus College in 1952. In 1959 he received the Special Union Gold Medal of the British Ornithologists’ Union on the occasion of the Centenary celebrations. At about the same time he was made a Corresponding Fellow of the American Ornithologists’ Union. In 1966 he received the Stamford Raffles Award of the Zoological Society of London for ‘distinguished contributions to ornithology’.

W. H. THORPE