[Sidenote: _MONTAGU’S CLOSE OBSERVATION._]
Colonel Montagu was an extraordinary observer. He was a man who possessed the _seeing_ eye. He forgot nothing that he once clearly saw. He was one of the best Naturalists, so far as logical acumen and earnest research were concerned, that England has ever seen. The late Professor Forbes said of him that “had he been educated a physiologist, and made the study of Nature his aim and not his amusement, his would have been one of the greatest names in the whole range of British science. There is no question about the identity of any animal that Montagu described. . . . He was a forward-looking philosopher; he spoke of every creature as if one exceeding like it, and yet different from it, would be washed up by the waves next tide. Consequently his descriptions are permanent.” We might also say of Edward, that although comparatively uneducated, he possessed precisely the same qualities of observing and seeing. Nothing that once came under his eyes was forgotten. He remembered, and could describe fluently and vividly, the form, habits, and habitats of the immense variety of animals that came under his observation.
Now, this Colonel Montagu had in 1808 discovered on the shore of South Devonshire the same Midge that Edward rediscovered in 1864 on the shore of the Moray Firth. Colonel Montagu had clearly and distinctly described the fish in the second volume of the _Memoirs of the Wernerian Natural History Society_; but he had not given any figure of it. He named it the Silvery Gade (_Gadus argenteolus_). The Colonel passed away, and with him all further notice of his fish. It was never again observed until, fifty-six years later, it was rediscovered by Edward. Future writers on British fishes ignored it. They believed that Colonel Montagu had been mistaken, and had merely described the young of some species already known. Even Mr. Couch, the most accomplished ichthyologist of his time, had swept it out of his list of British fishes. But Montagu was too close an observer to be mistaken. As Professor Forbes had said of him—“There is no question about the identity of any animal that he described; consequently his descriptions are permanent.”