7 NOVEMBER 1908, Page 8

A Day at the Zoo. (S.P.C.K. 2s.)—This is not an

ordinary "day at the Zoo." We see actual cages, things which stand up, and have creatures inside them. It is true that these creatures— the rhinoceros, the vulture, and the pelican, and those poor relations of ours the orang-utan and the chimpanzee, with the fishes—are such as haunt the woods and rivers of Flatland. Still, the whole contrivance is a triumph of ingenuity, and reflects the greatest credit upon the person who devised it.

Two small picture-books which, different as they are in style, as far as the drawing is concerned will alike, please little folk, may be mentioned together. One is The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck, by Beatrix Potter (F. Warne and Co., ls. 6d. net). Jemima is a discontented lady who makes the very dangerous acquaintance of Mr. Reynard. Her grievance was that she was not allowed to batch her own eggs. The

drawings are delightful and most delicately comic. Jemima wears a shawl and a poke-bonnet, but she is still a duck, and Reynard is a fox for all his fashionable coat. The other, The Story of Little Black Quasha, by the Author of " The Story of Little Black Mingo " (J. Nisbet and Co., ls.), is more broadly comic. Quasha and her frog are creatures of another world, but they are dis- tinctly amusing.