The Wild Flowers of Scotland. By J. H. Crawford. (John
Macqueen.)—Mr. Crawford, whose unconventional works on the natural history of Scotland have not undeservedly gained for him the reputation of being that country's Jefferies, has now followed up his previous successes with a volume on the wild flowers of Scotland. In all its leading characteristics it closely resembles its predecessors. It is written with the same unstudied simplicity of style ; and its author shows the same pervading, rather than intense, love of his subject, or rather subjects. There is no literary make-believe about these wander- ings of his in spring and summer by the sides of hedges or up the slopes of the Grampian hills. He never gets angry with anybody,
not even an English tourist or a railway contractor, unless he in some way sins against Nature. The nearest approach to wrath is his onslaught upon Wordsworth for his eulogy upon the lesser celandine. "The Ayrshire poet moralised over the daisy, and Tennyson had the taste to follow so good an example. The Westmorland poet must needs moralise over something else. I question whether the reputation, either of flower or poet, is very much bettered thereby." In contrast with this little outbreak of something almost like spleen place this almost Selbornian passage: "The main association, in my mind, between the poppy and the marguerite, is their common preference for a railway embankment. Sometimes they grow together. The red mingles with the white in Nature's own unstudied way, which never errs on the side of bad taste. Sometimes poppy and marguerite divide the space between them, and even choose different embankments, as if each wished its own share of admiration ; so that one train may speed through poppy-land and another through marguerite- land. Not only does the poppy appear before the marguerite, but it lingers after; and then we get a reign of pure white and another of pure red." It is in this truly loving spirit that Mr. Crawford writes of the various wild flowers and other plants— bluebells, saxifrages, heather, whin, and broom—of which his country claims almost a monopoly. Patriotic though he is, how- ever, he does not ask for more than justice to Scotland. He strikes mercilessly at popular fallacies, as when he says that the common view that Scotland is the natural home of the heaths because it is so mountainous is only partially true. "It would be much nearer the truth to say that Scotland marks well-nigh the northernmost limit of the heath zone, and only three of the hardiest of an immense family have been able to penetrate so far." Mr. Crawford has been compared, as a lover of Nature, to Jefferies. In his power of submitting to, and even in revelling in, such hardships as are the accompaniments of storms he recalls his own indomitable countryman, Thomas Edward. And, in spite of his dislike to Wordsworth—or at least to Wordsworth's sonnet—he is not a little of a poet. Who that knows St. Mary's Loch and Yarrow side will not at once admit the truth of this ?—" Storm on St. Mary's has something of a human outburst in it. Rain falls with the bitter significance of tears." In short, while this book is not better than the others of the delightful series to which it belongs—all are equally good— it is the most enjoyable.
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