Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 3 (1899).djvu/554

524 possess and know so well. The feature of this edition is that it is edited by one who was a literary man first and a naturalist afterwards, though this was the irony of Mr. Grant Allen's life, and, could he have lived up to his tastes, the arrangement would probably have been reversed. Gilbert White's masterpiece, however, appeals to the literary taste as much as it belongs to the science of natural history, and it is very questionable whether it would have obtained its immortality had its pure and charming style not have recorded its wealth of observation. This editor has a sympathetic touch with his author, and he is not far from his subject when he writes of "the life of a quiet, well-to-do, comparatively unoccupied, gentleman of cultivated manners and scientific tastes, studying nature at his ease in his own domain, untroubled by trains, by telegrams, by duns, by domestic worries; amply satisfied to give up ten years of his life to settling some question of ornithological detail, and well pleased if in the end his conclusions are fortunate enough to meet the approval of the learned Mr. Pennant, or the ingenious Mr. Barrington."

This book is well printed on good paper, and with wide margins; the illustrations are profuse, and enable us to almost master the present aspects of Selborne and its vicinity, but these are far superior to those given of zoological subjects. It is a good copy to possess, and those who care to make marginal notes will appreciate the appendix of the "Marginalia" from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's copy here printed for the first time. Of course we expect something original from Coleridge, and we are not disappointed. "Instinct is the wisdom of the species, not of the individual," is an anticipation of modern thought; while the keen but delightful criticism of the lines at the end of Letter XLI., commencing, "Say, what impels, amidst surrounding snow," is simply "a noble paraphrase of 'I don't know.'"

To many, if not to most, readers the above title will denote a purely botanical book foreign to our scope and pages. But much may be said, and has been said, as to the zoological affinities of the Myxomycetes, or Slime-Moulds, which "include certain very