Wild Life of Scotland. By J. H. Crawford, F.L.S. (John
Macqueen.)—This is a very delightful as well as informing book which, in respect of style, recalls Thoreau rather than either Jefferies or Burroughes. "I am touched," says Mr. Crawford in his introduction, "with a passion for wild nature,—the wilder the better ; and confess to a special interest in whatever lives beyond enclosures and has not been spoiled by that form of taming known as preserving." This " passion " has not prevented Mr. Crawford from becoming a scientific naturalist, but it has prevented him from lapsing from boyishness of enthusiasm into mere dryas- dustish accuracy in dreary matters of detail. Every fourth page or so one comes on such a passage as "The passionate strains of the lark may well be addressed to his patient partner among the bents. But his health must be of the most exuberant description to give him strength enough to throw it away on so many visits to the clouds. It is hard to imagine a lark that has sat out all night in several degrees of frost and then gone without his breakfast besieging heaven's gate with jubilant melody. True, he was singing when I crossed the links yesterday, but only a mere frag- ment of his song was delivered from the ground, or at most from a few yards in the air." But while the spirit of this book is delightful and, in a sense, contagious, it is full of information about the "wild life "—Nature's Bohemia as it were—of Scotland in all quarters from Loch Leven and Loch Tay to Shetland. Mr. Crawford is catholic, too, in his tastes, being as partial to the grouse and the ptarmigan as to the stag, and being as much at home among marine mammals as among the larger "animals of sport." He is tolerant even of so-called " vermin " such as foxes and owls. The latter he declares to be "Nature's mousers," and he reminds us that when" introduced to the dwelling-house the white owl supersedes the necessity for a cat." Altogether this book, which belongs to the rare order that can be taken up at any moment and easily read in instalments, is by far the best and most convenient handbook to Scottish natural history—in the most comprehensive sense of the word—that has ever been published.
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