19 FEBRUARY 1887, Page 24

British Cage Birds. By R. L. Wallace. (L. Upcott Gill.)--An

exhaustive book on a subject which interests many readers. There must be hundreds of thousands of English people who keep birds in cages, and are for the most part sadly ignorant of how they should treat them. How few, for instance, know that when a robin is troubled with vertigo, you should treat him to an occasional earwig ! Here is an encycloprodic treatise which gives a description of plumage, size, weight—for one must know what one's bird is—of habits, disposition, song or note or croak, capattity of acquiring human accomplishments, ailments, &c. There are more than ninety kinds which can be thus kept, some of them, we must confess, new to us as inhabitants of a cage,—cuckoos, kingfishers, and wag-tails, for instance. Each bird is represented in his habit as be lives, and there are preliminary chapters on general topics, one of which, dealing especially with their exepa'e tcal ovIcoreamt cal temaptat, shows us that there is a great deal of human nature, no to speak, in birds.