Our Mammals
British Mammals. By L. Harrison Matthews. (Collins. The New Naturalist Series. 25s.) OF late years there has been something approaching a spate of books on birds, yet mammals have been comparatively neglected. As the author reminds us, no complete text-hook on British mammals has been published for at least forty years, and thus the book under review is opportune and valuable.
As might be expected from the author, the work is Scholarly and the style clear and lucid, so that the non-scientific reader can under- stand without difficulty the many interesting facts and theories set down in its pages. It is obvious from this book that Dr. Harrison Matthews is a nature-lover besides being a scientist. There are, we learn, approximately fifty land mammals in Britain. If the whales and the northern seals, such as the Harp seal and the walrus, which rarely visit our shores, be added, the list rises to no more than eighty. Yet some of these mammals are extremely abundant, and the author believes that the population of field-mice exceeds that of man.
This book imparts information not only on the mammals of the present age, but on those which are now extinct in Britain, some of them throughout the world. Perhaps the author is right when he excludes, as wild British mammals, the white cattle of Chillingham and other places ; he is on less assailable grounds when he describes the wild goat of Britain today as of domestic ancestry. There is a ttlidition, which he may or may not know, that the wild goats which haunt the rock-bound coasts of the Isle of Mull had their origin on vessels of the Spanish Armada which were wrecked here, the goats being carried on these war vessels to provide milk for the seamen.
It may be news to most of the readers of this book that in A.D. 962 King Edgar of the Saxons imposed a tribute of 300 wolves yearly, the tribute being apparently confined to England and Wales. There are various Highland legends concerning the slaying of the last wolf in the Highlands circa 1740; in one the animal is said to have been slain by Cameron of Lochiel. The bear was exterminated centuries before the wolf, but during the Roman occupation bears were exported alive from Britain to the Roman circuses.
Two of the most interesting chapters in the book are on deer and seals. The remarkable weather sense in red deer is touched on. When deer climb to the high grounds in weather which seems, by human standards, to hold little encouragement, it is a sign that conditions will quickly improve. Conversely, when deer travel down-wind to shelter, it is a sign that a storm of unusual severity is about to break. I hoped the author might have had something to say on the elevation above sea-level at which the red-deer calf is born. On one occasion I came upon a new-born calf at 3,600 feet, and have reason to suppose that at times a deer calf may be born as high as 4,000 feet on the Cairngorm fills. In the chapter on British seals the author has interesting things to say concerning the power of the Atlantic seal (halichoerus grypus) of prolonged submergence at considerable depths. This seal, he says, can remain submerged for about twenty minutes. It has been found that, directly the seal dives, the rate of its heart-beat is reduced from 150 a minute to ten a minute. This slow rate is maintained throughout the animal's dive, and is not increased, however active the seal's movements may be. The sluggish heart-beat and circula- tion-rate evidently retard the consumption of precious oxygen. In his description of the breeding-places of the grey or Atlantic seal the impression is given that he considers the North Rona colony exceptional in that here the seals are land-animals during the breed- ing season. But, indeed, this type of colony is the normal one in the Hebrides. On Gasker hundreds of seals mate and have their young as high as a hundred feet above the sea, and the same holds true of the Hasker colony, and to a lesser extent of the Shillay communal nursery. In his chapter on hares, rabbits and rodents the author makes some interesting remarks on the Raasay vole. This Hebridean vole is at least twice the weight of its relative on the mainland. Another very distinct sub-species is the Skomer vole, found only on the island of Skomer off the Pembrokeshire coast. So tame are the Skomer voles that, when taken from a box-trap, they will sit in the human hand, wash their faces and eat a proffered crumb. One had hoped to hear something of rnelanism in the blue hare, which, as the late Duke of Portland showed, was not uncommon in the hares of his deer-forest of Langwell in Caithness.
The photographs, some of them in colour, others in black and white, are of a uniformly high standard, and there are also ninety-two figures in the text. The get-up of the book equals the high standard set by earlier volumes in the New Naturalist series. No naturalist in Britain today can afford to be without this
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