By Leafy Ways : Brief Studies from the Book of
Nature. By Francis A. Knight. Illustrated by E. T. Compton. (Elliot Stock.)—Mr. Knight's " Brief Studies," reprinted from the Daily News, are perhaps better fitted for newspaper essays than for continuous perusal in book-form. But nothing can be pleasanter than such gossip about Nature when listened to in brief moments of leisure. There is a chapter in " Evenings at Home," a volume dear to the children of fifty years ago, called " Eyes and No Eyes," of which we are reminded upon reading Mr. Knight's sketches. There are people who live a country life and know nothing of the objects daily before their eyes, there are others to whom the hedgerows,. woods, and fields supply exhaustless subjects of interest. True naturalists—men like White of Selborne, Waterton, or Gould— are probably as much men of special and incommunicable powers as the musician or the poet ; but the observation of Nature is a faculty everybody can cultivate, and it is pitiful to think how many men who have taken honours at the Universities know nothing of natural objects beyond what they have learned through the " spectacles of books." If the readers of a daily newspaper are made unpleasantly conscious of their ignorance through Mr. Knight's " Studies," he will -not have written in vain. Some of the illustrations are very pretty, and the volume may be recom- mended as a gift-book.
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