Edgar Stead

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 504, 18 February 1949, Page 5

Edgar Stead

HE sudden death last week of Edgar Stead was more than a blow to his relatives and friends in Christchurch, It was the loss of a national figure in the field of natural history-per-haps our most outstanding figure since the death of Guthrie Smith, but in any case a distinguished amateur who gave his whole life to natural history when he could so easily have won distinction in other ways. From early manhood he was a rich man as riches‘go in New Zealand; and since he was even then recognised as a man of far more than average ability, half a dozen careers were open to him. He chose natural history -birds and their ways, plants and the problems of acclimatisationand for 40 years must have been one of the happiest men in the® Dominion. Men who place knowledge before riches and power are perhaps a little commoner in older countries than in our own; but they are never numerous ‘anywhere; and when one does appear who has not only the inclination to make that choice but the means and the opportunity, it is manna from Heaven for the rest of us. The collection of birds, birds’ skins, and birds’ eggs which Stead presented to Canterbury Museum a little before his death was the best New Zealand collection in the world. His collection of rhododendrons and azaleas was probably the best in the Southern Hemisphere. But he was very much more than a collector. The things he assembled and passed on to the public were merely the pieces of evidence of his wide and deep knowledge. It was certainly a little extraordinary that the man who so much loved birds was also so expert in shooting them (with a gun as well as with a camera); but the worst anyone could say about that was that he never quite grew up. He was a boy before he was a man, and he remained the gun-loving boy as he remained the hot-headed and podint-scoring controversialist long after such weaknesses should have been outgrown. And boys are more attractive than desiccated pedants.