THREE BOOKS ON BIRDS.
A Book of Birds. By W. P. Pycraft, A.L.S., F.Z.S. With 80 Full-page Coloured Plates and many Illustrations in the Text. (Sidney Appleton. 6s. net.)—This is a companion volume to Mr. Kirby's "Mammals of the World." A trustworthy ornithologist, who is one of the assistants in the Natural History Museum, has been secured to deal with birds. Mr. Pycraft has discharged his difficult duty as well as can be expected. He has produced a survey of the birds of the world which contains the most recent ideas as to classification, is fairly readable, and yet mentions a great many species. The coloured plates are fair, and, considering the moderate price of the book and the difficulties of selecting, they deserve praise. There arc figures of nearly every bird which is dealt with in the text. Mr. Pycraft's survey of the birds which compose the various orders is prefaced by an introduction in which he shortly touches on the reptilian ancestry of birds, the structure of feathers, and the anatomy of typical birds. A plate of the complete skeleton of a bird would have been a useful addition to the illustrations. The book is a most excellent one for a boy with a taste for natural history. He will learn a great deal from the plates, and find a mass of information in the text. Moreover, he will lay a scientific foundation for his knowledge, and have nothing to unlearn, until the discovery of new facts leads to all our old notions being once more uprooted, an a now classification of birds put forth by those in authority.— The World's Birds. By Frank Finn, B.A. (Oxon.), F.Z.S. With over 60 Illustrations from Photographs (mostly taken from Living Specimens) and Outline Figures in the Text. (Hutchinson and Co. 6s. net.)—We cannot help thinking that Mr. Finn would have produced an equally handy and a more satisfactory little. book of reference if he had dealt with the birds of the world in systematic instead of alphabetic order. After an excellent, but very short, introduction, he begins with the American vultures (Cathartideo), goes through all the families in order, and ends with the woodpeckers (Picidse). A great quantity of accurate and. compressed information is given under headings such as size, form,. plumage, young, nest, eggs, incubation, courtship, food, gait, flight, note, disposition and habits, economic qualities, captivity, distribution, and important species. Mr. Finn is already well known as a writer on popular ornithology who is also a trustworthy authority. The mass of facts collected, digested, and arranged in these two hundred pages is amazing. The plates of typical species are well chosen.—The British Warblers : a History, with Problems, of their Lives. By H. Eliot Howard, F.Z.S., M.B.O,U. Illustrated by Henrik Griinvold. Part II. (R. H. Porter. 21s. not.)—The second part of Mr. Howard's splendid monograph on our warblers fulfils the promise made by the part which we noticed some while ago. The chiffehaff and the yellow-brewed warbler are dealt with. The habits and doings of the former familiar little songster and migrant are described with wonderful minuteness. The latter bird is a rare straggler from Siberia, and the text is limited to a description of the bird and to its distribution. A vast amount of time and patience has been devoted by Mr. Howard to the observa- tion of birds' habits, and he records facto with scientific exactness. In this part we have four coloured plates and six uncoloured photogravures of remarkable excellence. There are also two maps showing the geographical distribution of the sedge-warbler and aquatic warbler during summer and winter. They form a very interesting addition to the book.
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