Summer Studies of Books and Birds. By W. Warde Fowler.
(Macmillan.)—Not a few readers have learnt to look for one of Mr. Warde Fowler's rare papers, and still rarer books, as a great treat. In this volume we have eleven essays, contributed either to Macmillan's Magazine or to the Proceedings of Natural History Societies. Most of them are about birds, their songs, of which Mr. Fowler is a great connoisseur, and their habits generally. One delightful chapter, " Billy : a Memoir of an Old Friend," tells the story of a dog. The most characteristic of all the papers is, perhaps, chap. iv., " The Marsh-Warbler in Oxfordshire and Switzerland." It is a great pleasure, not unmixed with wonder, to read of the boundless patience with which Mr. Fowler observes. He has told us himself elsewhere that Nature has not gifted him with acute hearing or sight. Yet few people, though they had the eye of a hawk and the ears of a puss, could match him in the keenness with which he notes sights and sounds. In "Aristotle on Birds" we have an interesting blend of the scholar and the naturalist. He concludes that the philosopher was not much of an observer. He picked up information about living birds from hearsay, from books, and, doubtless, from inquiries made of observers at first hand. His own personal study was in dissecting.
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