CURRENT LITERATURE.
Farming for Pleasure and Profit : Second Section, Poultry Keeping. By A. Roland. (Chapman and Hall.)—There are so many good books on poultry—books thoroughly scientific, and yet thoroughly practical —that Mr. Roland's volume was hardly needed. We fail to discover- in it any conspicuous merits of style, accuracy, or arrangement. A good deal of information, of one sort or another, has, however, been here gathered together, and the directions, cautions, and suggestions as to the management of poultry are, in the main, Nand. But there is an absence of system in the author's treatment of his subject ; the want of an index being one sign of this defect. Something definite about the composition of different poultry-foods ought to have been given; the time has gone by when an intelligent reader should be content with such a statement as (p. 71) "malt-dust is said to con- tain from two to three times the flesh-forming properties that wheat possesses." Then, too, modern remedial measures should have been described, such as the extermination of parasites by means of car- bolic powder. More care in its compilation would have improved this book considerably.
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