EXHIBITION
IN his introduction to the catalogue of the National Book League's
exhibition of British Birds and their Books " which he has organised—and which will remain open at 7 Albemarle Street, W.1, until May 3rd—Mr. Raymond Irwin remarks on the large proportion of books that comes from a remote corner of Dumfriesshire, where Mr. John Gladstone and the Rev. J. M. McWilliam have their homes. Mr. Gladstone has lent nearly a hundred volumes of the classics of British ornithology from the fifteenth century to the present day, and his neighbour Mr. McWilliam has provided, besides much expert advice, an interesting collection of early children's bird books. Most visitors will soon be drawn to the works of the eighteenth-century illustrators : among the displayed plates they can hardly fail to admire George Edwards' engaging hoopoe and William Lewin's splendid jay. Mr. lolo Williams has lent a pencil drawing of a heron made by Bewick for one of the cuts in his History of British Birds, and special attention is paid to Gilbert White in a collection of outstanding editions of Selborne lent by the Rev. W. S. Scott. Many modern books are represented, as well as original paintings by such artists as D. M. Henry, A. Thorburn, Peter Scott, G. E. Lodge, R. B. Talbot Kelly, and (most notably) the charming eighteenth-century flower-painter Georg Ehret, whose yellow- hammer and blue tits introduce him in a hitherto unsuspected capacity as a first-class' painter of birds. There is even a collection of twenty-five Victorian Christmas-cards featuring the robin. And, amid all these riches, some may think that the photographs of barn
owls by John Warham and Eric Hosking steal the show. D. H.
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