" ZOO " ANIMALS AND OTHERS.*

Ma. EDMUND SELOUS seems to have had more than one object in his mind in writing his Zoo Conversation Book. The scheme of the book is the not unfamiliar plan of making a certain number of the animals in the London Zoological Gardens talk to a small boy about themselves and their lives in their native country. In doing this they contrive to put into their conversation a good deal of sound natural history, and also to tell a number of excellent stories, many of them, apparently, gathered from a long list of books on sport and travel which Mr. Selous prints after his last chapter. But the aim of the book does not seem to be wholly educative. It is partly a pamphlet emphasizing the cruelty of big game hunters, and partly it

seems to serve as a medium for complaint as to the system of keeping wild animals in captivity. This variety of standpoints is a little confusing. It may be all very well to inculcate a dislike of big game hunting into boys and young people, even if it involves a gruesome description of the methods of riding down and shooting giraffes—about the cruelty of which, by the way, we are all of us probably already agreed. No more hateful way of killing a beautiful and harmless wild animal than shooting it through the length of the body from behind can be imagined. Again, it is high time that the old familiar fiction of the danger of hunting grizzly bears was abolished once for all. In the old days when hunters went out to tackle grizzlies with light or faulty rifles no doubt the danger was considerable, since grizzly bears belong to the tr4 nachant class of animals which, when they are attacked, defend them- selves with the utmost ferocity. But the grizzly against modern weapons is powerless, and he knows it ; his great desire is to get away from them. All this Mr. Mons does well to emphasize ; but his sympathy with the hunted as against the hunter or captor leads him occasionally a little too far. He records the misfortunes and perils of his creatures' lives, as if they were anticipated or encountered in the way in which human beings would anticipate or en- counter them. His animals not only suffer, but they are pathologists ; they know the reason why. The polar bear, for instance, is represented as remarking, " with a most sad expression," that his mute would have kept her cub alive under natural conditions, but that in so small a space and in the "severe damp "—he breaks off with a melancholy emphasis on the word "here," and you are left to conclude that in Regent's Park only misery could be expected. Mr. Selous even allows himself to be unfair to the management of the Zoological Gardens, as when he represents the giraffe as saying that "it's always bay here "—the point conveyed being that the giraffes would like leaves or branches of trees, but that they are never given to them. As a fact the giraffes do have tree branches, to pull leaves from, and the best cure for anybody who thinks the polar bear miserable is to go and look at him.

Mr. Selous's book, however, is a real addition to the growing literature of the Zoo, and others besides boys and girls will be able to learn much from its well-stocked pages. Mr. Roberts's work is on a smaller scale, and perhaps owes a little more than Mr. Selous's to predecessors in the same field. Mr. Roberts takes his reader round the Gardens and exhibits in turn the actual animals in the cages, describing the appear- ance and habits of individuals rather than tribes. Some of his descriptive titles of chapters are not very happy—" beefy beasts," for instance, as applied to the cattle. Miss Lilian Gask has a different method. She, too, like Mr. Selous, adopts the plan of taking a small boy 'round the Gardens, but she gives him for a companion an elderly colonel whose chief interest is birds, and who is commendably agitated at the callousness of women who wear egrets' feathers, knowing how they are obtained. The Colonel is probably right : the attraction of a hat banishes all other considerations. But lie has much more to tell his companion than the familiar history of egrets and their young. Miss Gask has studied her subject, and con- trives to make the journey round the aviaries a lecture which beginners will find full of information. Each aviary is visited

• (1) The Zoo Conversation Book. By Edmund Selous. Illustrated by J. A. Shepherd. London : Mills and Boon. 158. not.]—(2) Zoo Folk. By W. J. Roberts. Illustrated by the Author. London : Werner Laurie. 13s. ad. net.] —(3) Bird Wonders of the Zoo. By Lilian Gask. Illustrated by A. T. Elwes. London : Wells Gardner, Barton and Co. (28. ad. net.)—(4) Tales of the Untamed. By Douglas English. Illustrated by the Author. London Eveleigh Nash. (5s. net.1—(5) Birds and Beasts. Translated from the French of Camille Lemonnier by A. R. Allinson. Illustrated by E. J. Detmold. London: George Allen and Co. f5a.]—(6) The Lion. By Agnes Herbert. Illustrated by Harry Dixon. London : A. and C. Black, Ps. 8d.1

in turn, and the Colonel tells his companion not only the history of the birds in it, but stories and observations from the best books on the subject. On one or two points it might be possible to argue with Miss Gask—ae to the reason why -eggs laid in holes are white, for instance. Miss Gask seems to think that it is to allow the parent birds to see where they are. Would she reject the theory that they are 'white like the eggs of the reptiles descended from the same ancestry ? The fact that turtle doves and wood- pigeons lay white eggs, again, has nothing to do with protec- tion from surrounding foliage, but is merely an instance of a

,changing habit. Stock doves and rock doves still build in

]poles; woodpigeons, we may guess, have only lately ceased to elo so, and in the course of aeons hence may lay green, or blue,

-or spotted eggs, as do thrushes and blackbirds and rooks. Birds and Beasts, if it does not exactly suffer from trans-

lation from the French, has something of a French outlook on the lives of the creatures whose adventures make up half a -dozen simple children's stories. Ornithology is probably not

ri strong point with the French author, or we should find his goldfinch "plumping his crop" with thistle seeds rather than oats.' But there is a kindly touch in the small inaccuracies, and Mr. E. J. Detmold illustrates the

sstories with pictures oddly original in colour and com-

position. His owl, even if it is of uncertain breed, as a delightful bird altogether. Of another translation,

or rather adaptation, from the French it is difficult

to write with pleasure. Mr. Douglas English's Tales of the . 'Untamed is an English version of De Goupil a Margot, Histoires de Baes, which was published in 1910 by the Mereure de France, and won for its author, M. Louis Pergaud, the Prix de Goncourt of 5,000 francs, instituted by Edmond Goncourt, and awarded annually by the Acaddmie Goncourt -for "the greatest piece of imaginative writing of the year.', It would always be interesting to read in French a work which had won such a prize ; but we question whether it was worth while to translate it into another language. Mr. English's writing is forcible, indeed, brutal ; he has probably given as good an idea of M. Pergaud's book as could be contrived, but the whole effect is merely distressing. Nature can be red and cruel as well as kindly and gentle; and we do well to realize the presence and meaning of the pain and blood in her work ; but there are limits to the need of describing her processes on paper- -especially when, as in several of these stories, the point is the interruption or the destruction of the process by man, A wild fox caught and sent back into the woods with a collar and bell, unable to get food or to come near other foxes ; a pine marten biting her foot off in a trap; a magpie made drunk with spirit and dashing into a lamp—such subjects may sug- gest a perfect tour de force of description, but they can also be infinitely disagreeable to read. We wonder what the French author would have made of the subject which Miss Herbert has chosen for her book, The Lion. This is' one of Messrs. .Black's series of life-stories of animals, and Miss Herbert has -admirably fulfilled her task. Her lion lives in Somaliland, where Miss Herbert's readers may remember she once travelled as one of Two Diaros, and from her knowledge of the country and the habits of its beasts she has con- .-strutted a. quite convincing picture of a lion's career from a cub to the day when he goes down, his strength ebbed from him, under a pack of jackals. It is a really workmanlike little book. Whether or not Miss Herbert has been fortunate enough to witness all the scenes which she describes with so much vigour, she has the gift of making them real, and she knows how to put the feelings of an intim]. 'on paper without making him reason and hope and fear like st human being. Her lion is a great cat, with a great cat's mixed savagery and noblesse, and as a cat he lives and loves -and hunts and dies. The value of the hook is enhanced by

11e. Dixon's pictures,

-that ought to belong towillijoenlis,hcaovuenttiyie. light and heat in them