Ogilby examined at Cambridge a living specimen of the species he called the "whitefooted Paraduxure". He examined it again in London in August 1828, by which time he was sufficiently conversant with the organic structure of animals and the principles of taxonomy to recognise the creature as a previously undescribed species which he classified as intermediate between the common genet and the common cat and to which he assigned the name Paradoxurus leucopus. His description and classification of the animal appeared in a paper which was printed in The Zoological Journal of January 1829 and was the earliest among his many published contributions to zoological research. The species he identified was included in Coenraad Temminck's 1839 monograph on the genus Paradoxurus. Ogilby's arrival in London gave him access to the works of Continental naturalists and to specimens of animals and birds held by the British Museum, the Zoological and Linnean Societies, and the East India Company. He later became a regular visitor to the museums at Leiden and Paris, and he observed animal locomotion and behaviour at the Zoological Society's Regent's Park menagerie, the Surrey Zoological Gardens at Newington, the Menagerie du Jardin des plantes at Paris, and in private collections such as that of Lord Derby. He visited Germany (notably Berlin and Frankfurt) on several occasions and the Cape Colony more than once. The breadth of his knowledge of literary sources from which useful natural history material could be quarried was evident when he alerted Professor Thomas Bell to an editorial note in Swift's Considerations about Maintaining the Poor referring to the importation of frogs to Dublin from England at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Zoological Society contributions and appointment From 1830 onwards, at meetings of the Zoological Society, he read explanatory papers or delivered commentaries on specimens donated to the Society's museum. Some forty of his reports were printed in either full or abstract form in the Society's Transactions and Proceedings during the years to 1841, describing and classifying new examples of mammals and birds from Australia, Africa, the Americas and India. In the same period he also read similar papers to the Linnean Society and commented on fossil specimens to the Geological Society. Publication of his classifications established and named the several genera Cynictis (1833), Madoqua (1836), Pseudocheirus (1837), Chaeropus and Conilurus (1838), and placed many new species within previously established genera. He chaired meetings of