Dr. Thomas Morland Hocken, an Englishman who settled in Dunedin, New Zealand, in 1862, made important contributions to his adopted country both by bequeathing to the University of Otago his fine library of New Zealand, early Australian, and Pacific books and materials he had assembled and by actively pursuing scholarship in colonial history and in enumerative bibliography. While his book collection was not particularly large, it achieved stature through being tightly focused on works relating to New Zealand. Hence, in compiling a bibliography of some four thousand texts that had been published up to 1909 on this subject, he was able to draw extensively on his own copies. In its fields of special interest the Hocken Library is one of the most vital research centers in New Zealand.

Thomas was the third of the four surviving sons of Joshua Hocken, a Wesleyan Methodist preacher from Bodmin, Cornwall, and Anne, ne...