Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 1 (1897).djvu/311

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is an excellent book to put in the hands of a birdloving boy or girl, or better still to serve as a school prize book. We well recollect how little natural history was found in the academical volumes presented to the weary scholar some forty years ago; and when some zoological treatise was dispensed it was usually a mixture of second-hand observation and turgid teleology. Now all this is changed, and there seems to be a danger sometimes that the mass of juvenile literature will end in amateur science.

Mr. Fulcher writes pleasantly on our native birds, and treats his subject on the lines of a somewhat conversational narrative, in which a considerable amount of information is afforded as to habits, nesting, &c. The method is purely non-scientific—not by any means unscientific—the English bird names being alone given, and classification quite ignored; the principal works used in verification and amplification of the author's own observations being, we are told, Hudson's 'British Birds' and Dixon's 'Eggs and Nests of British Birds.'

The illustrations are numerous, but we cannot help thinking that the facial expression of the Long-eared Owl given at p. 249 is of a particularly benign and human-like description.

recently noticed the completion of Sir G.F. Hampson's contribution to this series on the Moths or Heterocera. With commendable promptitude Col. Bingham's first volume of the Hymenoptera—Wasps and Bees—has appeared. Indian naturalists as a whole and oriental entomologists in general will gladly welcome this publication. The Hymenoptera have not attracted numerous workers and students as the Lepidoptera have done, and yet, as our author remarks, the "Hymenoptera have a right to be considered the most highly developed mentally of all