Not even Darwin or Wallace—or Mr. IL M. Tomlinson—has imparted
to us a more suggestive sense of the tropical forest than Major Hingston in a Naturalist in the Guiana Forest (Arnold. 188.). He commanded the Oxford expedition to Guiana, and this is the first official record. He is, first of all, a great entomologist of experience in many continents. No one has Made more startling discoveries in the habits and instincts of the ants of the world ; and a good part of the botik concerns the insects of the immense Guiana forests, at least as strange as any in Brazil. The particular examples of protective coloration would make the book notable. Most creatures 'are hard to see owing to their colour schemes and attitudes, except those that are dangerous and those harmless insects that have learnt to put on and mimic the awe-inspiring colours of the warriors. The technical additions to such knowledge are many ; but the volume is a sort of prolegomenon to the individual contributions to the study of birds, mammals. insects, spiders and plants ; and its triumph is the picture of the forest, its dark and enchanted magnitude, where the only colour is on the unseen roof, where to study bird or flower you must ascend to different strata by what ladders you can devise for the uniformly straight and branchless pillars. It is full of things that "have you by the hair" as Meredith wrote of Westermain : ants, towering funguses that grow often front animals' bodies, leaves and vegetable parasites of all kinds ; and the distance of the light kills colour on the floor of the forest. But the glories and wonders of the scene grew on the company of naturalists, as invisible stars slowly appear on a camera, when their experience and eyes enabled them to find the teeming life in what seemed an almost tenantless gloom. The delicate drawings, as of various spiders' webs, the photographs of general scenes and particular actions, help greatly to impart the picture and would make even a child interested. But it is the curiosities of insect adaptation that give its higher value to the book. It is a contribution to science, but so charmingly written and with so many descrip- tive pictures that we may all read it as we read The Cruise of the 'Beagle.'
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